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Category: Miscellany

Published April 12, 2013

Something for the Weekend

The Gigantic Beard That Was Evil by Stephen Collins is out next month. The launch party is at Gosh in London (but I just wanted to post the cover because it is fantastic).

Belief in the Writer — Mark Danner talks to Robert Silvers, founding editor of the New York Review of Books, at New York Magazine:

I believe in the writer—the writer, above all. That’s how we started off: admiring the writer. We organized the New York Review according to the writers we admired most: Edmund Wilson, Wystan Auden, Fred Dupee, Norman, Bill, Lizzie, Mary among them. Each of them had a confident sense of their own prose, and it meant a great deal to them—the matter of a comma, a semicolon, a word—and it does to our writers today. And so, when it comes to making a change, we should not do it without their permission. If a moment comes at some point where we see something should be improved, we don’t just scribble it in but call them up wherever they are. And that is, I think, crucial.

Consternation — Renata Adler, whose novels Speedboat and Pitch Dark have just been reissed by NYRB Classics, in conversation at The Believer:

it used to be one way a young writer made it in New York. He would attack, in a small obscure publication, someone very strong, highly regarded, whom a few people may already have hated. Then the young writer might gain a small following. When he looked for a job, an assignment, and an editor asked, “What have you published?” he could reply, “Well, this piece.” The editor might say, “Oh, yeah, that was met with a lot of consternation.” And a portfolio began. This isn’t the way it goes now. More like a race to join the herd of received ideas and agreement.

But, too mean versus too nice? I don’t know. Nice criticism is good when it tells you something. A lot of negative “criticism” isn’t criticism at all: it’s just nasty, “writerly” cliché and invective.

Isolation — Antonia Quirke reviews the movie Oblivion for the Financial Times. The movie itself sounds immediately forgettable, but this is spot on:

It’s the sense of isolation in good science fiction that we really dig. Studios refuse to get it into their skulls, but audiences have tremendous patience for the sci-fi blues – long lonely sequences with things feeling a bit lost or off, followed by a little bit of tension and action. We don’t really need much more.

And finally…

Who can resist academic hoaxes? When Dickens Met Dostoevsky:

It is not only that the apparent practice of submitting articles under fictitious names to scholarly journals might well have a chilling effect on the ability of really existing independent scholars to place their work. Nor is it just the embarrassment caused to editors who might in an ideal world have taken more pains to check the contributions of Stephanie Harvey or Trevor McGovern, but who accepted them in good faith, partly out of a wish to make their publications as inclusive as possible. The worst thing here, if they are fictitious, is a violation of the trust that remains a constitutive element of the humanities. There is, it seems to me, a fundamental difference between posting partisan, anonymous reviews on Amazon, where there is no assumption of proper evaluative standards or impartiality, and placing similar reviews or hoaxing articles in academic journals, which are still the most hallowed sites for the development and transmission of humanistic ideas. The former is a cheap act of virtual graffiti; the latter may be the closest a secular scholar can come to desecration.

The whole thing is bonkers.

(Next you’ll be telling me Sherlock Holmes didn’t meet Sigmund Freud).

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Published April 10, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

Ian Thompson reviews Mod: A Very British Style by Richard Weight for The Observer:

Mod’s first choice of music was jazz, Richard Weight reminds us. Miles Davis in particular became a fashion icon for blue-eyed soul brothers everywhere in Britain. The photograph of Davis on the cover of his celebrated 1958 Milestones album – Sta-Prest trousers, button-down Ivy League shirt – became a sort of mod pin-up. Mods (“modernists”) were among the first white Britons to embrace west-coast jazz, which had been galvanized by the Birth of the Cool sessions led by Davis in New York from 1949-50.

See also: Gavin James Bower’s review for The Independent.

It is What it is  — Five designers, Craig Mod, Rodrigo Corral, Michael Fusco, John Gall, and Jon Gray, on the books that inspire them, at the Virginia Quarterly Review.

Here’s Mr. Gall:

The clearest explanation of a good cover that I have ever heard came from Michael Beirut. I was a guest invited to critique a book-cover project he had given to his Yale students. As I was struggling to express some notion about why a particular concept may or may not be working, he got right to the point: “It has to look like what it is.” Indeed.

 

 

The Darkness — Sarah Weinman profiles Canadian author and illustrator Jon Klassen (I Want My Hat Back, This is Not My Hat, and The Dark) for Maclean’s:

Klassen’s style shies away from sentimentality. Instead it shows young children the consequences of bad behaviour through the prism of humour, a technique that hearkens back to books for children by the likes of Shel Silverstein and Roald Dahl.

And finally…

On the Exaggerated Reports of a Decline in British Fiction at the White Review:

Our peculiar creed is mortally suspicious of untrammelled aestheticism, endlessly asserting the primacy of content over form. In accounts of British writing, even now – long after such a thing could be anything other than a rather quaint anachronism of an old culture war – the avant-garde features as a kind of bogeyman. One whose dandified aestheticism belies a questionable politics, a moral compass gone awry; who must be beaten back by decency and common sense. Literary experiment still tends to be perceived as a pernicious form of French ‘flu: of course we should still be bloody grateful for the English Channel, separating, as it does, steady, dependable old Blighty from that kind of thing.

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Published April 5, 2013

Something for the Weekend

The Man — An interview with the talented Seb Lester, typographer and artist, at The Raw Book:

People may associate me with flourished calligraphy and intricate formal script styles, but I don’t want to be known as a stylist because I feel I can do a wide variety of things. I want to try to constantly evolve and progress, with quality being the only theme running through my work. No one would guess most of the projects I’ve worked on have been done by me.

There is something quite wonderful about watching Lester at work:

 

The Beauty of Letterpress — An online resource and showcase created by Neenah Paper, featuring “the best and most innovative letterpress work in the industry today.”

And finally…

Heart-Shaped Box — Phil Bicker, a senior photo editor at TIME, interviews photographer Bert Stern at Time Lightbox:

1962… also saw the release of Lolita, directed by his old friend Stanley Kubrick. He asked Stern to take some publicity shots for the film. Stern took then 13-year-old actress Sue Lyon and her mother to a five-and- dime store in Sag Harbor, on eastern Long Island, to make the pictures. “I walked into the store and saw all these sun heart-shaped sunglasses and candy canes and other fun stuff that became the props for the shoot. I had not seen the movie but I underlined passages in Nabakov’s book that would make picture ideas. I always work with words that become pictures.”

See also: Stern discusses his work and Shannah Laumeister’s new documentary Bert Stern: Original Mad Man at the New York Times’ T Magazine.

 

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Published April 4, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

Work / Life — An interview with the brilliant Louise Fili, designer and former art director of Pantheon Books, at The Great Discontent:

Everybody wanted to use standard fonts, but I just wasn’t satisfied doing that. I didn’t realize this until years later, but what I was really doing was developing type treatments for the title of the book and approaching it more like a logo. I wanted each book to have its own personality and that couldn’t be achieved with standard fonts. Again, I was lucky because it was appropriate to do that for the types of books I was working on. The other thing to note is that I was collaborating with a lot of really talented illustrators and made a concerted effort to combine the type and image together. I also tried to encourage illustrators to create their own type. I would sketch it out for them and then ask them to actually draw it so it would become part of the illustration, which makes for a stronger design, whether it’s a book cover or logo.

Colour and Intention — Claire Cameron interviews Sam Garrett about his translation of The Dinner by Herman Koch, for the LA Review of Books:

The words a writer uses not only have a dictionary definition, but also a color and an intention. To pin those down, the translator has to sniff around. From the first to the final word of a translation, you’re leading the reader along a path to a destination. The color is what keeps the reader hopping; the intention is the scent that keeps the translator on the right path.


Negotiations — Jim Tierney explains his design process for the cover of Ruth Ozeki’s A Tale for the Time Being:

I decided to run with the first concept that popped into my head: a very simple and tactile facsimile of the red Proust notebook, embossed with an illustration of Nao, floating spectrally above the rocky coast of British Columbia. I think this design is all about questions: How did this book get here? Was it lost intentionally, or by accident? Is Nao alive or dead? Is she even real?

Minimal designs like this is always a hard sell in cover meetings, and it was immediately rejected as too quiet and precious-looking. Loud, colorful, and commercial are popular adjectives in modern book marketing, but it’s always fun to start off negotiations with something a little more obscure.

And finally…

Welcome back from near-death Dan Mogford. Please don’t do that again.

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Published March 27, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

The Creative Review interviews Richard Littler, the man behind the absolutely bloody terrifying Scarfolk:

For me, the desired effect can only be achieved if the images are visually authentic. The seriousness of presentation and form is absolutely crucial. It lulls the viewer into a false sense of security so that the gap between expectation and reality – the juxtaposition of staidness and absurdity – is as wide as it can be.

The fictional authors, designers and archivists of Scarfolk’s public information material must sincerely believe in the gravity of the message that the subject matter wants to convey and deserves, such as rabies. In addition, the whole concept of Scarfolk has to be internally consistent. There has to be a credible, believable identity.

Greatly Exaggerated — Salon’s Laura Miller on technology, self-publishing, and why publishers and bookstores are still matter:

If print could talk, it would surely be telling the world, Mark Twain-style, that reports of its demise have been greatly exaggerated… New self-publishing enterprises are a godsend for traditional publishers because they can take much of the uncertainty out of signing a new author. By the time a self-published author has made a success of his or her book, all the hard stuff is done, not just writing the manuscript but editing and the all-important marketing. Instead of investing their money in unknown authors, then collaborating to make their books better and find them an audience, publishers can swoop in and pluck the juiciest fruits at the moment of maximum ripeness…. [That’s] exactly what happened with erotica blockbuster E.L. James.

Epitaph — A smart take on the end of Google Reader by Paul Ford for The Financial Times:

This is the downside to apps: when everything is online your ability to labour along in familiar ways is contingent upon money coming to the app provider. This works when we remain consumers, for example of media objects such as paywalled newspapers, Netflix and Spotify. We lease access to the databases, own nothing, and the access makes it worthwhile. But when we work inside these systems we increase our levels of risk. When Google Reader goes away, it will not be like a television show being cancelled – much work is lost, and the ability to access that work is also lost.

The Exploded Mind — A big interview with artist, illustrator and picture book maker Oliver Jeffers at The Great Discontent:

Balancing integrity versus income is tricky; when I make decisions, sometimes I know that I might not be as well off the next year, but I’ll certainly be making the best work. I figured out early on that there are certain things I don’t want to do when it comes to how I’m perceived. I try to stay away from advertising, even though that’s where the big money is. In the visual arts, you are often only as good as your reputation and associations, so you have to think ahead and be smart. As far as commercial commissions, I’m not just a gun for hire; I actually have something I’m trying to accomplish and a way of making work that I want to continue and be known for. Although some lucrative offers came in for illustration work, I realized that taking them would be shortsighted and could possibly stunt other aspects of my practice.

See also: ‘Maurice Sendak’s Jumper and Me‘ by Jeffers at The Guardian:

Sendak was trying to satisfy himself. He was telling these stories, as much a way to make sense of the world around him as anything else. He was using them as a poet uses poetry and a painter uses paint. He was making art that ultimately transcended himself and neat classification. Perhaps as a result he was one of the first contemporary picture-book makers to discover the power of picture book as a way of storytelling for everyone. Perhaps this might go some way to explain why his books have won over so many, regardless of geography or decade – because he is putting himself, and the way he views the world on paper, darkness and all.

And finally…

Dr. Jazz — James Hughes on Stanley Kubrick’s unmade film about jazz in the Third Reich, at The Atlantic:

Kubrick’s interest in jazz-loving Nazis… represents his most fascinating unrealized war film. The book that Kubrick was handed, and one he considered adapting soon after wrapping Full Metal Jacket, was Swing Under the Nazis, published in 1985 and written by Mike Zwerin, a trombonist from Queens who had performed with Miles Davis and Eric Dolphy before turning to journalism. The officer in that Strangelovian snapshot was Dietrich Schulz-Koehn, a fanatic for “hot swing” and other variations of jazz outlawed as “jungle music” by his superiors. Schulz-Koehn published an illegal underground newsletter, euphemistically referred to as “travel letters,” which flaunted his unique ability to jaunt across Western Europe and report back on the jazz scenes in cities conquered by the Fatherland. Kubrick’s title for the project was derived from the pen name Schulz-Koehn published under: Dr. Jazz.

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Published March 24, 2013

Something (Late) for the Weekend

Enjoy Your Cigarette — Tom Cox reviews Penguin’s Underground Lines boxed set for The Guardian:

Underground Lines often matches its writers to its tracks very well, in terms of temperament as well as personal history. The Jubilee line, so often associated with capitalism and the Docklands development, is a good match for John O’Farrell, a writer whose wit was marinated in the political 1980s. The nervy prose of William Leith could not be more apt for the rather fraught Northern line, and his manic, anxious account of being evacuated from a train that was filling with smoke is probably the most addictively readable thing here. “People never tell you to have a pleasant journey on the underground, just as people will say, ‘Enjoy your meal,’ but never ‘Enjoy your cigarette,'” he writes.

Dirty Lit — Edward Jay Epstein at the NYRB Blog on being taught literature by Nabokov:

He made it clear from the first lecture that he had little interest in fraternizing with students, who would be known not by their name but by their seat number. Mine was 121. He said his only rule was that we could not leave his lecture, even to use the bathroom, without a doctor’s note.

He then described his requisites for reading the assigned books. He said we did not need to know anything about their historical context, and that we should under no circumstance identify with any of the characters in them, since novels are works of pure invention. The authors, he continued, had one and only one purpose: to enchant the reader. So all we needed to appreciate them, aside from a pocket dictionary and a good memory, was our own spines. He assured us that the authors he had selected—Leo Tolstoy, Nikolai Gogol, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Jane Austen, Franz Kafka, Gustave Flaubert, and Robert Louis Stevenson—would produce tingling we could detect in our spines.

Exploded Hearts — Melville House’s Christopher King on his cover design for How to Keep Your Volkswagen Alive by Christopher Boucher, at Talking Covers:

In the end, I did what I usually do, which is to steal an idea for the cover directly from the manuscript. In this case, the narrator’s son—who, again, is a car—has a heart in place of an engine, so I printed off an image I found online and showed it to our publishers:

“It’ll be like this exploded diagram of a car, but with a heart in place of the engine.”

“OK!”

And finally…

The Wall Street Journal looks at ‘The Improbable Rise of NPR Music‘ which, for all of the WSJ’s obvious churlishness, manages to be fascinating despite itself:

NPR Music’s breadth, depth and ability to break new material are its main strengths. The site offers music that appeals to rock, jazz and classical lovers—all under one roof. Still another advantage is NPR Music’s ties to “All Things Considered” and “Morning Edition,” which, even if Washington-centric, have music woven into their fabric and provide news for the site as well as a familiar storytelling style.

NPR Music in its present form just turned five. “It’s the closest thing we have to a pure startup inside what is now a 40-plus-year-old institution,” says Kinsey Wilson, NPR’s executive vice president and chief content officer. “This group of now roughly 20 people has had an opportunity to invent something from scratch.”

(via Largehearted Boy)

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Published March 20, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

WHAAM! — Comics historian Paul Gravett on Roy Lichtenstein’s appropriation from comics:

Lichtenstein’s… success, his getting away with turning supposedly anonymous ‘found’ comic art into high-priced paintings, continues to directly encourage others to do the same. But there is a difference—comics are no longer uncredited, trashy mass culture, and what worked as a lucrative schtick back in the Sixties art world is now largely drained and devoid of any shock value or irony… Five decades on… it is high time for the comics world and the art world to properly debate these issues, and to celebrate these hugely talented but still largely ignored visual storytellers.

(Pictured above: a page from ‘The Star Jockey’ drawn by Irv Novick, from All-American Men of War #89 February 1962)

See also: David Barsalou’s Deconstructing Lichtenstein project

(If Gravett underestimate’s Lichtenstein’s ingenuity in recontextualizing comic book panels, and his lasting influence on art AND comics, it is truly astonishing to see how poor Lichtenstein’s paintings are in direct comparison to the work he borrowed from.)

Blowing Shit Up — A long essay by Richard Nash on the business of literature at the VQR:

Selling a book, print or digital, turns out to be far from the only way to generate revenue from all the remarkable cultural activity that goes into the creation and dissemination of literature and ideas. Recall again all the schmoozing, learning, practice, hustling, reading upon reading upon reading that goes into the various editorial components of publishing; the pattern recognition; the storytelling that editors do, that sales reps do, that publicists do, that the bookstore staff does. Recall the average feted poet who makes more money at a weekend visiting-writer gig than her royalties are likely to earn her in an entire year. You begin to realize that the business of literature is the business of making culture, not just the business of manufacturing bound books. This, in turn, means that the increased difficulty of selling bound books in a traditional manner (and the lower price point in selling digital books) is not going to be a significant challenge over the long run, except to free the business of literature from the limitations imposed when one is producing things rather than ideas and stories. Book culture is not print fetishism; it is the swirl and gurgle of idea and style in the expression of stories and concepts—the conversation, polemic, narrative force that goes on within and between texts, within and between people as they write, revise, discover, and respond to those texts.

See Also: Book Publishers Scramble to Rewrite Their Future by Evan Hughes for Wired.

And finally…

The New Statesman has posted five classic book reviews from their archive, including V. S. Pritchett’s review of 1984 by George Orwell:

Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book that goes through the reader like an east wind, cracking the skin, opening the sores; hope has died in Mr Orwell’s wintry mind, and only pain is known. I do not think I have ever read a novel more frightening and depressing; and yet, such are the originality, the suspense, the speed of writing and withering indignation that it is impossible to put the book down. The faults of Orwell as a writer – monotony, nagging, the lonely schoolboy shambling down the one dispiriting track – are transformed now he rises to a large subject. He is the most devastating pamphleteer alive because he is the plainest and most individual…

 

 

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Published March 15, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Typgraphica’s favourite typefaces of 2012. There’s a lot to love about Balkan Sans by Nikola Djurek and Marija Juza. But check out the ligatures on Levato by Felix Bonge:

 

Chasing the White Rabbit — Francine Prose on dreams and literature, at the New York Review of Books blog:

Literature is full of dreams that we remember more clearly than our own. Jacob’s ladder of angels. Joseph saving Egypt and himself by interpreting the Pharoah’s vision of the seven fat and lean cows. The dreams in Shakespeare’s plays range as widely as our own, and the evil are often punished in their sleep before they pay for their crimes in life. Kafka never tells us what Gregor Samsa was dreaming when he awakens as a giant insect, except that the dreams were “uneasy.” Likely they were not as uneasy as the morning he wakes into. By the end of the first paragraph of “The Metamorphosis,” Gregor has noticed his arched, dome-like brown belly, his numerous waving legs. “What has happened to me? he thought. It was no dream.”

Krautrock on the Underground — An excerpt from Earthbound by Paul Morley, part of the Penguin Lines series for the 50th anniversary of the London Underground, at The New Statesman:

“Krautrock” was the convenient collective name given in a slightly jokey, slightly wary and affectionately patronising way to an eclectic collection of radicalised German groups from very different parts of the country that contained musicians who were born in the few years before, during or just after the Second World War. Another collective name for these groups, still frivolous but more descriptive of their mission to create sound never heard before on our planet and invent music that could make you feel you were leaving the earth behind, was “kosmische”. As well as Can, these groups included Kraftwerk, Tangerine Dream, Amon Düül II, Cluster, Popol Vuh, Harmonia, Neu! and Faust, and they were looking for ways to repair their traumatic recent history, remove the crippling infection of fascism, break free of totalitarian artistic repression, negotiate turbulent social and emotional currents, and radically, romantically reinstate the positive, progressive elements of their mortified national psyche.

See also: Jonathan Gibbs looks at the design of the Penguin Lines series at The Independent.

And finally…

Fact-Checking at the New Yorker, an excerpt from a new book called The Art of Making Magazines:

When the new, remade The New Yorker of the last decade was gearing up and we started getting all these late-breaking stories, issues such as logic and fairness and balance—which previously had been the responsibility of the editors—began to fall on the checkers. This wasn’t by anybody’s design. It was because the editors were really busy putting these stories together and they wanted us to look at things from the outside and see how they were framed, and look at them from the inside and look at the logic and the way they were reported and the way quotes were used and many other such things.

That responsibility came to us not in the way of anybody saying suddenly, “You’re doing that.” It just became that when a problem arose, they would come to us and say, “Why didn’t you warn us?” And so it just became clear that there was this gap between editing and checking that had opened up under the pressure of later-breaking stories, and it just seemed logical that we should fill it. It made our job more challenging, and more fun.

(via Kottke)

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Published March 12, 2013

Monday Miscellany

“The Bat-Man” by Chip Kidd and Tony Millionaire from Bizarro Comics #1. I can’t quite believe I haven’t seen this before… (via Martin Klasch)

Could Have Been Something — José da Silva interviews Billy Childish for The White Review:

Critics want you to get in your box and shut up. That’s why they don’t like it that I’m a writer, musician and painter. That’s totally unacceptable to their small minds… I’m looking for freedom from being categorised or identified with aspects of myself. But at the same time I use this very strong biographical information to negotiate a world – a world which I find quite mental, by the way. So I still refuse to identify myself as Billy Childish the artist,  painter, writer or musician, because in my estimation only an idiot would want to be something.

Accommodating the Mess — Tim Martin on B S Johnson,  ‘Britain’s one-man literary avant-garde’, for The Telegraph:

In principle, at least, Johnson’s declared mission echoed the great Modernist cry to make it new. Politically socialist and from a working-class London background, he cultivated pithy distrust for the complacency of his novelist peers, “neo-Dickensian” writers, as he called them, who were using a 19th-century form to gratify the “primitive, vulgar and idle curiosity of the reader to know ‘what happens next’”. A truly modern novel would seek, in Beckett’s phrase, a form to accommodate the mess, stripping readers of their escapist illusions while remaining ruthlessly true to the writer’s experience.

This obsession with so-called narrative truth runs through Johnson’s work, accounting for its most unorthodox experiments as well as its greatest flaws.

See also: Juliet Jacques review of Well Done God! Selected Prose and Drama of B S Johnson for The New Statesman.

And finally…

The mild-mannered Richard Hell in the New York Times:

After running away to New York in 1967, at the age of 17, with dreams of becoming a writer, Mr. Hell collected some good editions of favorite books. Then, in the 1970s, when he became a drug addict, he traded them for cash.

“Those were pretty much my only liquid resource,” he said. “So I sold them all over the years.”

Since getting his health and career back on track in the ’80s, he has replaced most of the ones that got away. Given the number of books now neatly stacked into the East Village apartment where he has lived for the last 38 years, he has more than made up for lost time.

Hell’s memoir, I Dreamed I Was a Very Clean Tramp, is out this week. The cover was designed by Steven Attardo.

 

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Published March 6, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

‘The Art of Harvey Kurtzman’ curated by Monte Beauchamp and Denis Kitchen opens at the Museum of American Illustration in New York on March 6th. Boing Boing has more (via Drawger).

On a related note: Steven Heller on Al Capp at The Atlantic:

[Denis] Kitchen…loved Capp’s unpredictable plots, his sexy women, and his uncouth, often grotesque cast. But as a college student, Kitchen told me, he witnessed Capp’s transformation “from a progressive figure to a student-hating, pro-Vietnam War pal of Richard Nixon and Spiro Agnew. And not long afterward saw sex scandal headlines gut his fame. Almost overnight he lost everything.” This intense love-hate feeling toward Capp and his work is what led Kitchen to want to understand the man better.

And: Kitchen talks to Michael Dooley about the new book Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary, at Imprint:

“I thought Al Capp was a flat-out genius. That said, I had also known for many years that he had quite a dark side. I’d been collecting every article and scrap for years and interviewing any associate I could find, so I fully expected our biography to depict a deeply flawed and even tortured man…  The ‘monster’ we discussed earlier was also a devoted son and father, an often generous man with assistants and strangers, a man capable of great charity, a man who wouldn’t tolerate a racist or homophobic joke.”

(To be honest, Capp still sounds kind of irredeemable.)

Every day. Onwards. — A. L. Kennedy on writing for love (and money), at The Guardian:

The first novel was treated gently and coddled probably more than it deserved to be. This wouldn’t happen now. The short story anthology as a first book is rarer than unicorn pie. (May contain traces of horse.) The hope of making even 50% of your income as a published author any more in the UK has probably also gone – unless you are lucky enough to produce a bestseller, preferably involving porn. This may change when UK publishers discover that the production of ebooks reduces overheads as well as cover prices. Who knows – it does tend to take a while for UK publishers to notice most things. I worry in case, for example, their offices catch fire and they all burn to death over a period of weeks, coming and going, sadly unable to realise that their coffees are boiling away to nothing in their melting cups. And this is, of course, a hard time for all industries, from the sprightly to the moribund.

Kennedy’s new book On Writing has just been published in the UK by Jonathan Cape.

See also: a short interview with Kennedy in Metro.

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Published March 1, 2013

Something for the Weekend

Impressionable Minds — Edward Tenner on Al Capp: A Life to the Contrary and the legacy of the controversial cartoonist, at The Atlantic:

I still think of Fosdick as Capp’s masterpiece, running postmodern-style as a comic strip within a strip and accepted good-naturedly by Chester Gould, creator of its target Dick Tracy, for whom Capp always professed the highest regard. Its greatness exists even if Capp bowed to 1950s social conservatism in marrying Li’l Abner and Daisy Mae (which his emerging rival Charles Shultz called the worst comic-strip decision ever) in 1952. Even Disney didn’t hitch Mickey and Minnie Mouse.

Yet Fosdick, who had been introduced a decade earlier, was a pivotal character, probably the most subversive of authority of any of the comic personalities, but presented with such engaging absurdity that even Dr. Fredric Wertham’s anti-comic crusade could not stop him. As Shumacher and Kitchen say, it was an adult strip—and yet it was one acceptable on a Sunday morning around the family dining table, whatever its effects on impressionable young minds.

Friends Electric — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on the difference between online and offline experiences:

The reason people struggle with the tension between online experience and offline experience is because there is a tension between online experience and offline experience, and people are smart enough to understand, to feel, that the tension does not evaporate as the online intrudes ever further into the offline. In fact, the growing interpenetration between the two modes of experience—the two states of being—actually ratchets up the tension. We sense a threat in the hegemony of the online because there’s something in the offline that we’re not eager to sacrifice.

And finally…

Who says publishing is full of over-caffeinated alcoholics? — Prospero on the future of bookstores:

For a bookstore to remain successful, it must improve “the experience of buying books,” says Alex Lifschutz, an architect whose London-based practice is designing the new Foyles. He suggests an array of approaches: “small, quiet spaces cocooned with books; larger spaces where one can dwell and read; other larger but still intimate spaces where one can hear talks from authors about books, literature, science, travel and cookery.” The atmosphere is vital, he adds. Exteriors must buzz with activity, entrances must be full of eye-catching presentations and a bar and café is essential.

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Published February 28, 2013

Midweek Miscellany

Toy Monkeys — Steven Heller interviews Canadian artist and illustrator Gary Taxali for Imprint:

Illustration is in rapid flux. How pictures are being used defies what we traditionally knew about illustration. Many artists are empowered by new digital media. Yet I sense a fear about the continued life of a still picture. People were talking about how illustrations needed to “move” two years ago. That’s not illustration, that’s animation. Most illustrators can’t animate. The timeless power of a still image will never leave the human psyche despite what new gadgets can accomplish.

(pictured above: I Love You, OK? by Gary Taxali, published by teNeues)

Stanley Kubrick’s 1972 rejection letter to Anthony Burgess, at Letters of Note:

I earnestly hope that our all too brief friendship will survive me telling you that the MS is not a work that can help me make a film about the life of Napoleon. Despite its considerable accomplishments, it does not, in my view, help solve either of the two major problems: that of considerably editing the events (and possibly restructuring the time sequence) so as to make a good story, without trivializing history or character, nor does it provide much realistic dialogue, unburdened with easily noticeable exposition or historical fact.

As Shaun Usher, editor of Letters of Note, points out: “Burgess was undeterred, and Napoleon Symphony was published as a novel in 1974. Kubrick’s movie, however, failed to materialise.”

Strange Places — Owen Hatherley reviews Museum without Walls by Jonathan Meades, for the London Review of Books:

What Meades does most often is praise things, especially things that are habitually ignored: he is surely our greatest exponent of what the Russian Formalists called ostranenie, ‘making-strange’. Architecture, as an art form, isn’t quite mundane enough to be made strange, and for that reason Meades would seldom recognise his writing as being about ‘architecture’ as such. Rather, it is about Place, somewhere architecture happens, at times in a very dramatic way, but doesn’t necessarily have the leading role. Architects take non-art, ‘the rich oddness of what we take for granted’, the mutability, detritus and accident that define truly worthwhile Place, and replace them with something static and unchangeable. However, unlike Iain Sinclair or the London ‘psychogeographers’… Meades does not fetishise the spaces between. ‘I have to admit to a fondness for pitted former rolling stock dumped in fields and for abandoned filling stations,’ he writes. ‘But man cannot live by oxidisation alone. It’s not a question of either atmospheric scrappiness or gleaming newbuild. It’s a question of both/and. It’s a question of the quality of the atmospheric scrappiness, the quality of the newbuild.’

And finally…

The best thing I’ve seen in ages… Roy Gardner’s designs for the sales tickets in his store Gardners’ Market Sundriesmen on Commercial St in Spitalfields, London:

No doubt knocking up these sales tickets was all in day’s work to Roy Gardner – just one of the myriad skills required by a Market Sundriesman – yet a close examination of his elegant graphic designs reveals he was also a discriminating and creative typographer.

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