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Tag: richard stark

Published July 25, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

A long interview with Darwyn Cooke about his latest Donald Westlake/Richard Stark adaptation, The Score (out this week if you’re interested).

Shadows and Fog — Jimmy Stamp on Batman and architecture, for ArchDaily:

Since its inception, Gotham City has been presented as the embodiment of the urban fears that helped give rise to the American suburbs, the safe havens from the city that they are. Gotham City has always been a dark place, full of steam and rats and crime. A city of graveyards and gargoyles; alleys and asylums. Gotham is a nightmare, a distorted metropolis that corrupts the souls of good men. In the excellent book, Woody Allen on Woody Allen, the famously nebbish auteur discusses his moody, Brechtian comedy Shadows and Fog, which takes place over the course of a single night in a vaguely European village. “Once you get out in the night, there is a sense that civilization is gone…You start to realize that the city is just a superimposed man-made convention… All the civilization that protects you and enables you to lie to yourself about life is all man-made and superimposed.”

In other words, civilization ends at night. And in Gotham City, it is always night.

Home of the Free — Mark Lamster on the role of the modern library, for Metropolis magazine:

The pressure to accommodate “other needs” is especially strong at public libraries, which are increasingly taking on civic functions that far exceed the historical mission of serving books to readers. “Libraries are the new cathedrals of our society. They’re very important sanctuaries,” says the architect Bing Thom, whose new public library in Surrey, British Columbia, a suburb of Vancouver, was designed as a space of communal engagement. “People are living in smaller and smaller spaces, so the library becomes the place you escape to for socialization, for solitude, to take a breath. It’s the last space in society that’s free. Even for the homeless. There is a sense of democracy; it is a common space we all share.”

The Worm Eaten Book — Jennifer Schuessler visits the summer Rare Book School at University of Virginia in Charlottesville, for The New York Times:

Rare Book School isn’t just about pondering jaw-dropping masterpieces of printing. What makes the experience unique, students say, is the chance to see — and touch — a huge variety of objects from the school’s own 80,000-item teaching collection, including many that have been folded, stained, waterlogged, written in, worm-eaten or sometimes completely disemboweled.

And finally…

Filthy Lucre — Tim Parks on the complicated relationship between money and writing, for the NYRB:

Writers can deal with a modest income if they feel they are writing toward a body of readers who are aware of their work and buy enough of it to keep the publisher happy. But the nature of contemporary globalization, with its tendency to unify markets for literature, is such that local literary communities are beginning to weaken, while the divide between those selling vast quantities of books worldwide and those selling very few and mainly on home territory is growing all the time.

 

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Published October 31, 2011

Stark’s Grofield Novels Designed by David Drummond

David Drummond designed the covers for the University of Chicago Press recent reissues of Richard Stark’s ‘Parker’ novels. Now David has designed great new covers for the reissues of Stark’s ‘Alan Grofield’ novels as well – The Dame, The Damsel, Blackbird and Lemons Never Lie.

I actually really like these earlier, slightly looser, alternatives as well:

David has written more about the design process on his blog, and you can read my interview with him here.

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Published October 6, 2010

Midweek Miscellany

The Man With the Getaway Face — Cartoonist Darwyn Cooke talks The LA Times’ Hero Complex blog about his latest Richard Stark (AKA Donald Westlake) adaptation, The Outfit, released this month:

With the first book, I was really trying to get Don Westlake’s worldview across to people. The story had already been told several times in films… and what-have-you, but it had never been told down the line, so it was really important for me to do that. With “The Outfit,”  I was able to sort of step back and say, ‘OK, the plan is we’re doing four books here; are there ways I can make this one stronger in terms of how it relates to the three other books?’ We don’t have, say, 20 books to get our readers acquainted with this entire world, so are there things that I can do here to help in that regard? So I changed a few things. And to be honest, I fixed a couple  of tiny problems with the story that I think Donald would have giggled about if I had brought them up. ‘Oh, geez, good point…‘

And on the subject of Richard Stark, David Drummond recently posted the final 3 covers (there are 18 in total) for the University of Chicago Press’ Parker reissues  (mentioned previously here):

Where the Wind Blows — Stephen Page, CEO of Faber & Faber, outlines the challenges facing existing book publishers at The Guardian:

Publishers perform roles that writers need. The question now is whether writers will continue to turn to existing publishers to perform these tasks, and whether they believe they offer value. Some authors will bypass publishers (some always have) but among most authors and agents I deal with, there is no appetite to do so, because publishers continue to perform essential roles for writers in both the physical and digital worlds (editorial, marketing, distribution, and so on). However, urgent questions are rising about how a successful 21st-century publisher ought to look and function, and whether existing publishers can adapt quickly enough…

A Hipster Never Teaches  a Square Anything — Over at Good, Lexicographer Mark Peters looks at the origins of the word “hipster” and why, these days, nobody admits to being one:

“Hipster” first popped up in 1940, and The Historical Dictionary of American Slang’s first use includes the statement that “A hipster never teaches a square anything.” The OED’s early examples include semi-definitions such as “know-it-all” (1941) and “man who’s in the know, grasps everything, is alert” (1946). Those descriptions sound groovy, but in the HDAS’s definition of “hipster,” we can find the seed that grew into today’s widespread hipster-phobia: “A person who is or attempts to be hip, esp. a fan of swing or bebop music.” It’s that attempting—especially in clumsy, transparent ways—that make the hipster horrible.

And finally…

What Batman Taught Me About Being a Good Dad — The headline tells you just about all you need to know about Adam Rogers post for The Atlantic (what dad doesn’t secretly believes that Batman is full of very important life lessons?), but hey…

I am trying to build a good human being here, someone who will make the world better for his presence. Because I don’t know any other way to do it, that means I’m building a little geek… I want him to think that these stories have weight, that they mean something; they are our myths. I give my son comics and cartoons and episodes of Thunderbirds because I want him to understand right and wrong, and why it’s important to fight the dark side of the Force. The mantras spoken in this corner of pop culture are immature, but they have power: With great power comes great responsibility. Truth, justice, and the American Way. The weed of crime bears bitter fruit. No evil shall escape my sight.

secretly
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