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Tag: zadie smith

Something for the Weekend

Saw this in person for the first time at a bookstore  last night… Gray318’s cover really is outstanding.

Natives on the Boat — Teju Cole, author of Open City, on his stay in the Roi des Belges in London, and an encounter with V.S. Naipaul:

This boat of which I am temporary captain is named the Roi des Belges. In 1890, Joseph Conrad piloted a steamship down the Congo on a boat with the same name. That journey became his inspiration for “Heart of Darkness,” a puzzling novella with nested narrators who unfolded a shadowed, strangled, brutal tale. He wrote it in the last year of the nineteenth century and published it at the beginning of the twentieth. So, this perch on which I sit above the Thames—the sky is blue now, the hundred-and-eighty-degree view of it full of long stratus clouds—this perch in which the city is exposed to me but I am not to it, is an homage to Conrad’s bitter vision. What might it mean when the native pilots the ship? What happens when the ones on the shore, numerous, unindividuated, are white?

See also: Teju Cole’s diary in the Financial Times and an interview with Cole at 3:AM Magazine. (Thanks Peter)

SciFi Now picks 10 of the best Judge Dredd story arcs.

Wood For Our Coffins — Adam Kirsch on the modern rival of fairy tales for Prospect magazine:

fairy tales have a double relationship to poverty. They are poor themselves—in motivation, imagery, description, ambiguity, complexity, everything that makes for literary interest—and they are the products of poverty. This is clear enough from their social and economic premises: they are frequently  tales of hunger and neglect and child abuse. What we remember about Hansel and Gretel is the gingerbread house and the witch in the oven, but it starts out as a portrait of starvation and infanticide: “If we don’t get rid of them, all four of us will starve,” the children’s mother says to their father. “You may as well start planing the wood for our coffins.”

And finally…

Imprint reviews The Lustigs: A Cover Story, 1933-1961, an exhibition of covers designed and illustrated by Alvin and Elaine Lustig opening at the CVA in Saint Paul, Minnesota, next week.

You can see more of the Lustig’s astonishing body of work at the Alvin and Elaine Lustig Flickr Pool

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Midweek Miscellany

Cartoonist and illustrator Tom Gauld chats with the Angry Robot blog:

I find [robots] almost endlessly interesting. There is tragedy in their place between sentient beings and disposable products. And … they are much easier to draw than real people.

I’m hoping to interview Tom here as well sometime soon (just as soon as I think of something smart to ask him).

Hard Scenes — Actor, writer and director John Turturro talks about his work and one of my all time favourite films Miller’s Crossing at the A.V. Club (via Biblioklept):

Sometimes you think about movies, and you say, “Well, I want to try to do something that’s not exactly in a movie.” If you’ve ever been in a very dangerous situation, you know that people will do all kinds of things to keep themselves alive. It was very well-written, but you want to imagine what it’s really like to be in that kind of situation. It depends on what you’re willing to do, and in real life you would do a lot of different things. I tried to capture a little bit of that… to do something that was almost a little difficult to watch, because people aren’t trying to be heroic at those moments.

Curiosity and Collecting — Writer and illustrator Tom Ungerer in conversation with Julie Lasky at Design Observer:

One of the most important things for one’s own development is curiosity. Once you have curiosity, you just accumulate. My interests go from botany to mineralogy, geology, anatomy, history. Sometimes I’ve been bitten like bug. I buy one object and I’m so fascinated that I start collecting. And then when I finish collecting, and the collection doesn’t inspire, I give it away, like my toy collection of 6,000 pieces that I donated to my hometown museum for children.

Learning to Write — An interview with author Zadie Smith at The Literateur:

[O]ne of the things I look for in other people’s writing is the ability to confer freedom. That’s what I want to be able to do myself. I like a writer who doesn’t have to be in total control of how their readers react. More mystery, less explanation. All I can say is I’m working on it. But it’s so hard! I really feel I’m just at the base of a huge mountain called ‘learning how to write’. I’m still only 35. Learning to write is a task that takes up your whole life.

And finally…

Rick Poynor on the unusual cover design for England Swings SF, published in 1968, also at Design Observer.

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Midweek Miscellany

Tick, Tick, Tick… — A lovely essay by Zadie Smith about Christian Marclay’s art film The Clock — a 24-hour montage of film and television clips about time — for the NYRB:

Marclay manages to deliver connections at once so lovely and so unlikely that you can’t really see how they were managed: you have to chalk it up to blessed serendipity. Guns in one film meet guns in another, and kisses, kisses; drivers in color wave through drivers in black-and-white so they might overtake them.

And still The Clock keeps perfect time. And speaks of time. By mixing the sound so artfully across visual boundaries (Marclay’s previous work is primarily in sound), The Clock endows each clip with something like perdurance, extending it in time, like a four-dimensional object. As far as the philosophy of time goes, Marclay’s with Heraclitus rather than Parmenides: the present reaches into the future, the past decays in the present. It’s all about the sound. The more frequently you visit The Clock the more tempted you are to watch it with your eyes closed… Nostalgia is continually aroused and teased; you miss clips the moment they’re gone, and cling to the aural afterglow of what has passed even as you focus on what is coming, what keeps coming.

The Real Story — An interesting and passionate post by the publishers of Two Ravens Press about the whys and wherefores of being a small press and the economic realities they face:

Why do small publishers bother? There are undoubtedly as many reasons as there are small publishers, but for people like us it’s because we’re tired of seeing the same old stuff on the bookshelves year after year after year. Safe books, based on the books that sold millions the previous year. Books that take few chances, books that fail to do anything to change the way we look at the world or ourselves. I wanted to go into a bookstore and be surprised. I wanted writing that was different, language that sang. And that’s why we started Two Ravens Press: to publish those books that big publishers were hardly bothering with any more. That’s also why the glib so-called ‘solutions’ to all the problems of an independent publisher like us that consist of helpful statements like ‘you need to have the commercial successes to fund the losses you’ll make on the literary, innovative stuff’ make absolutely no sense at all. Everyone else is publishing the commercial stuff. I don’t want to. Not doing that is my whole raison d’être. That’s the whole point! I don’t LIKE commercial stuff. I don’t think it ought to be banned, I don’t look down my nose at it, sometimes (but not often) I’ll even read it. But I don’t want to be yet another publisher churning out more of the same old writing. I want to do something different. I want literature.

See also: Lynn Michell, director of Linen Press on The Guardian Book Blog.

The Sound of Science — The New York Times on the unlikely success of WNYC’s innovative science show Radiolab:

This approach — a smaller number of shows, painstakingly assembled and treated more like small movies than like regularly scheduled programs — addresses a different tension, around new habits of media consumption. That is the tension between relevance and disposability. Discussions of technology and media tend to focus on speed — what’s the fastest way to break the story, consume the story, influence the story? After all, media consumers today seem like info-rats chewing through heaps of micro-facts and instant-expiration data points.

But the other interesting thing about media these days is that it can stand perfectly still. In fact it loiters: shows don’t simply spill over the airwaves and evaporate; they linger on DVRs, DVDs, various online services. Newspaper articles pile up in Web “archives.” And clearly we still accept, still crave, some deeper media experience too. In experimenting with a show that produces (at most) 10 episodes a year, WNYC was specifically thinking of HBO’s success in building powerful cultural franchises that ignore the mores of traditional broadcasting.

And finally…

Wall of Sound — Nikil Saval on how the iPod has changed the way we listen and respond to music:

The great 1990s magazine the Baffler spent its first half-decade analyzing how the culture industry managed, with increasing success, to recognize new musical trends and package them and sell them back at a markup to the people who’d pioneered them. The Baffler looked back to the punk scene of the early ’80s for inspiration; it spoke up for small labels that sold music to local constituencies. If you couldn’t get what you wanted on the radio, you would have to find it left of the dial—and keep looking over your shoulder for the man.

The danger now is different. The man no longer needs a monopoly on musical taste. He just wants a few cents on the dollar of every song you download, he doesn’t care what that song says. Other times he doesn’t even care if you pay that dollar, as long as you listen to your stolen music on his portable MP3 player, store it on his Apple computer, send it to your friends through his Verizon network. To paraphrase Yeltsin’s famous offer to the Chechens, take as much free music as you can stomach. We’ll see where it gets you.

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