A fantastic new cover for the Vintage (UK) edition of Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon, designed by Matt Broughton (via the Vintage Books design Tumblr CMYK)
CTRL+C; CTRL+P — Music critic Simon Reynolds, author of Retromania, on remix culture and ‘recreativity’ at Slate:
Recreativity has many proponents and represents a wide spectrum of opinion. Still, it’s striking how easily some of these critics and theorists glide from relatively sensible talk about the role of appropriation and allusion in art to sweeping claims of an ontological or biological nature. They seem so confident. How they can be certain that nobody has ever just come up with some totally new idea, ex nihilo? The remixed nature of everything (not new) under the sun has become an article of faith. Impossible to prove, these assertions tell us way more about our current horizons of thought and our cultural predicament than they do about the nature of creativity or the history of art.
The A.V. Club list their 50 best films of the ’90s. (Their list of their most-hated movies is here).
Picture This — Cartoonist Adrian Tomine discusses his work and his new book New York Drawings with the The Paris Review:
If you were to go back in time and talk to the people who invented cartooning, and were doing it for newspapers, and told them that there were going to be guys who were going to do twenty-four-page long stories, they would think that was a strange use of the medium. And if you then said, they’re going to try and inject that with a singular vision and personal experience and do six-hundred-page long stories—I mean, their heads would have exploded.
See also: Adrian on his first cover for The New Yorker at the The Thought Fox, the blog of his UK publisher Faber & Faber.
And Finally…
Speaking of The Paris Review, an interview with editor Lorin Stein at the LA Review of Books:
2 CommentsThe tradition of discovering new writers makes it easy to go out and find stuff that excites me, and at the same time feels of a piece with the history… To me it’s like that line in the great Italian novel, Lampedusa’s The Leopard. If you want things to stay the same, everything’s going to have to change. Nowadays we have to exist in the digital world if we don’t want to be strictly of the digital world.