An Ethics of Interrogation — Another stunning cover design by Isaac Tobin (via This Isn’t Happiness). My Q & A with Isaac here, if you missed it.
Isaac also has at least two covers in AIGA’s 2009 selections for 50 Books/50 Covers.
Reader Despair Syndrome — An unintentionally Onion-esque post about RSS anxiety (something we can all relate to I’m sure) by Leon Neyfakh for the New York Observer (via Sarah Weinman):
Legions of jittery, media-conscious New Yorkers are eating themselves alive signing up for feeds they never end up reading in hopes of becoming better people—more knowledgeable, more fun to talk to, more in control of their Internet consumption. They subscribe to dozens, sometimes hundreds of news sources, each of them added to the list with the best of intentions…
Hark! — Dave Howard interviews artist Kate Beaton about her comic Hark! A Vagrant for The Torontoist:
It’s very calculated, it takes me a long time to write a strip, but when you read it, part of the delivery is that timing, that kind of bouncyness of flow, getting a punch-line in without being obvious about it. Or getting the slip on someone, to make them laugh.To make somebody laugh is a difficult thing, it takes a lot of precise steps.
And speaking of comic strips…More Chris Ware posters seen at OMG Posters!
Zingers — Film critic and blogger Roger Ebert, who has lost the ability to speak unaided, on Twitter:
Twitter for me performs the function of a running conversation. For someone who cannot speak, it allows a way to unload my zingers and one-liners… This has become addictive. I tweet too often. I actually go looking for stuff to tweet. I have good friends who suggest things… I was doing this daily, but have scaled back because it was keeping me up too late.
I’ve made a change recently. After writing my blog, “The quest for frisson” and reading two recent articles about internet addiction, I have looked hard at my own behavior. For some days now I have physically left the room with the computer in it, and settled down somewhere to read. All the old joy came back, and I realized the internet was stealing the reading of books away from me. Reading is calming, absorbing, and refreshing for the mind after hectic surfing… I like the internet, but I don’t want to become its love slave.
Pelham’s covers featured a crepuscular sky above a barren expanse of water, sand or sunbaked earth as the backdrop for an artefact of twentieth-century industrial or military technology. According to the September 1974 issue of Science Fiction Monthly, these machines depict ‘the debris of our society’. Pelham, the article explained, ‘finds romance in seeing the future as if it were already the past – in visualizing ruins created from the artifacts we are manufacturing now’. But the paradox of Pelham’s artifacts is that they are not in ruins. His are pristine machines at odds with their apocalyptic settings. Half buried or submerged, they stand as tombstones to ostentation and brutality. They are icons, but only of man’s arrogance.
Drawing inspiration from the iconic Blue Note LP covers from the 1950’s and 60’s designed by American modernist designer Reid Miles, Hi-Fi is an amazing music video directed by Bante for last year’s concert season at the Bellavista Social Pub, in Sienna, Italy (how great does that sound?).
It’s beautifully done. In fact, the whole video just made me smile…
Somehow I managed to miss most of the hype leading up to the World Cup, but now that things are about to kick off I’m actually genuinely excited (not least by England vs. The U.S. on Saturday) and have spent the last couple of days catching up. Here are a few literary, typographical, and just plain interesting things that I’ve stumbled across…
Soccer Aid — A typographic poster for the World Cup designed by Treble Seven | 777 in aid of UNICEF.
The very same Simon Kuper reviews four books about the World Cup and African football for The Financial Times:
Great claims are often made for football’s significance. In fact it’s almost always a mirror rather than a gun: it reflects society, rather than changing it. Usually the sport has just one significant effect on real life: it makes people happier. At least, it usually does.
According to sources only peripherally aware of the World Cup, Janovich’s infuriating behavior first became apparent during a Super Bowl viewing party last February when he repeatedly used the phrase “American football” to describe the action on the field. In recent weeks, Janovich has also begun referring to the supposed suspense involved in choosing the players for the U.S. “side,” and has struck up several extended but one-sided conversations concerning figures such as “Kaka” and “Ronaldinho,” generally mystifying and alienating everyone he has come into contact with.
If the hype is extraordinary, so is the ambient presence. The last World Cup was all around us, on billboards, drink cans and cereal packets, on garage forecourts and millions of flag-bearing cars, in the windows of Boots the chemist and McDonald’s the burger joint (“Want tickets? Win tickets! Buy any large meal to play”). The cup-winning captain from 1966, Bobby Moore, was on every KitKat wrapper, despite having died 13 years earlier; his team-mate Geoff Hurst, now Sir Geoff, was appointed director of football for McDonald’s and had columns in two newspapers. The boys of 1966 were bigger in 2006 than they were in 1966.
Footballers as Film Stars — In a related item at the Intelligent Life blog looks at the Nike’s slick World Cup commercial created by Oscar-winning director Alejandro González Iñárritu (Babel):
And, not to be outdone, here’s a list of 10 football books worth your time (in no particular order) compiled at great haste for The Casual Optimist by my good friend and recovering sportswriter Nick Clifford who is a great source of useless facts about the beautiful game:
(full disclosure: this list has a couple of late additions from me, so if you disagree, it will probably be with my selections — Nick has impeccable taste).
Update: Flavorwire also has a list of 6 books to read during the World Cup.
[Recommendation engines] introduce us to new things, which is good, but those new things tend to be a lot like the old things, and they tend to be drawn from the shallow pool of things other people have already liked. As a result, they create a blockbuster culture in which the same few runaway hits get recommended over and over again. It’s the backlash against the “long tail,” the idea that shopping online is all about near infinite selection and cultural diversity. It has a bad habit of eating its own tail and leaving you back where you started.
Thompson was a man of the left, a lifelong alcoholic and became closely acquainted with the dark underside of American life, the lonely crowd where petty criminals, low-level cops, conmen and prostitutes rub shoulders… One of Thompson’s critics has called him without disparagement “a dime novel Dostoevsky”…
And finally… Popville, a super stylish pop-up book by Anouck Boisrobert and Louis Rigaud, published by Macmillan (thanks Sio!):
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 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.
A nice post about the US cover for The Girl With Dragon Tattoo — designed by Peter Mendelsund — and why it is so different from all international versions at the Knopf website:
[Peter] decided to shift away from the more traditional murder-mystery vibe of the foreign editions, instead providing a neon yellow in-your-face punch, a jolt of energy comparable to what Salander brings to the narrative… Knopf’s twist was achieved with the subtle interaction of the Trade Gothic type and a great piece of art in yellow and orange Day-Glo inks. Add a dash of cyan (shades of colors in the blue/green spectrum) to create the green dragon lurking in the background and a tablespoon of black for the title, flap copy, and Stieg’s photo, and voilà!
HP Sauce — Anis Shivani interviews Calvert Morgan, vice president and editorial director of Harper Perennial, for the Huffington Post:
[T]here’s an intensity of dialogue about writing online–and about fiction in particular–that was not happening ten years ago. A lot of the writers I work with are finding like-minded peers and readers, having a forum for discussion now that simply wasn’t available when the only venues you had to get published were little magazines that were distributed to a handful of shops across the country in physical form. We’re passionate proponents of the physical book and we don’t think it’s ever going to go away, but we also know that these online forums… are promoting the interest that these writers have in each other and in fiction generally in a way that can only be good for contemporary writing.
Multitasking makes us feel efficient, but it actually slows down our thinking. Our brains can’t handle more than one higher cognitive function at a time. We may think we’re multitasking, but in fact we’re switchtasking, toggling between one task and another. The phone, the email, the phone, back to the email. And each time you switch, there’s a few milliseconds of start-up cost. The neurons need time to rev up.Apparently, multitasking costs the US economy $650bn a year. I’m starting to think this isn’t a problem along the lines of love handles or bad mobile phone service. This is the 11th Plague.
My first day without multitasking… My brain is not cooperating. What the hell is going on? it whines. Where’s my damned stimulation? I sit at my desk and read the newspaper. That’s all. Without checking my emails or eating breakfast at the same time.
This is awful. I feel as if my brain has entered a school zone and has to slow down to 25mph. My plan is to leave my BlackBerry off until noon. I break down at 11.30am.
Typewriter repair may be a dying art, but it is not a dying business. All three of the shops… seemed to generate a comfortable living for their respective owners, supported by an eclectic clientele of collectors, design enthusiasts, prison inmates and tweenage girls.
In every case, however, the technicians in charge say that there won’t be a next generation to take their places. If they are right, as time goes on fewer and fewer of the old manual machines will remain in working order. That said, crops of amateur enthusiasts have sprung up to save other obsolete technologies from disappearing entirely…
For many people, the limitations of early writing machines, with their mono-font and unforgiving keyboards, are part of their charm. That bodes well for the future of typewriters, even after the last professional repairman hangs up his apron.
The charming illustrated cover for John Waters’ new memoir Role-Models by Eric Hanson, who also happens to be the author of A Book of Ages. Art direction on Role-Models by Susan Mitchell at FSG I believe.
And while we’re on the subject of nice book covers…
Isaac Tobin, senior designer at University of Chicago Press, talks to FaceOut Books about his witty cover for Adrian John’s Piracy. You can read my interview with Isaac here.
On the Dohle — PW takes a (slightly fluffy) look at Marcus Dohle’s first two years at the helm of Random House.
Allen Lane to Amazon — A nice audio slide-show history of British publishing in the 20th century at The Guardian.
And Simon Houpt on Penguin’s 75th anniversary and their iconic brand in today’s TheGlobe & Mail:
Until a couple of days ago, Keir Hardie had no idea how many Penguin books he owned. For years he’d been collecting them informally, picking up a few at a time at second-hand shops. “Like a lot of fans, I grew up in a house with Penguin Books on the shelves,” he wrote in an e-mail this week, from his home in Inverness, Scotland. It was the books’ iconic design, he explained, that first grabbed his eye. “There was never much of a pattern to anything else, but the uniformity of the Penguins made them stand out.”
Caustic Soda — James Morrison AKA Caustic Cover Critic talks about five great covers (and a few terrible ones) at Flavorwire. The great ones include Charlotte Strick‘s design for 2666 by Roberto Bolaño. Charlotte talked about this cover and boxed set with FaceOut Books a while back.
We are already in a world where most books are incomprehensible to most people –- whether that be content comprehension or the question “why would anyone publish that?” — but we don’t notice that anymore.
What has happened with the web is that there is so much content that we have broken all the old filters. And for now, we are experiencing it as the completely overburdened and chaotic environment that it is. But that doesn’t mean people should stop publishing online. It just means that we need better filters. Because in fact, the over-publishing of content has been a normal problem since the invention of the printing press. It’s just that we had ways of ignoring things we didn’t care about. The problem isn’t getting people to shut up, the problem is creating filters to help people find their way to things they want.
And finally…
I’m probably the last person on the interwebs to discover Erik Heywood’s blog on books, bookshelves, bookstores, and libraries (etc.), but it really is quite lovely (via The Silver Lining).
An Open Book-Publishing Platform — Book Oven’s Hugh McGuire on WordPress as a book publishing platform. It’s an intriguing idea even if don’t accept Hugh’s belief that books and the web will be indistinguishable in a matter of years. And, to judge by the comments, it something a lot of people have been working on.
Afterlife — With the US publication of The Girl Who Kicked The Hornet’s Nest, Charles McGrath looks at Steig Larsson, the late author of the Millennium series, and his unhappy legacy in the New York Times. Sarah Weinman has more on Larsson and the new book (of course)…
Enticement and Exegesis — Knopf designer Peter Mendelsund (who, incidentally, designed the covers for US editions of the Millennium books) on author David Foster Wallace, Infinite Jest, and book cover design:
Book jacket design should concern itself with, in my estimation, equal parts enticement (“Come buy this book”) and exegesis (“This is what this book is about, more or less.”) A good cover doesn’t let one category trump the other. A good cover should not resort to cliché in order to accomplish either. But the real key here, in both categories (enticement and exegesis) is the designer’s ability to work the sweet-spot between giving-away-the-farm, and deliberate obfuscation.
Book jackets that tell you too much, suck. Book jackets that try to change the subject also suck, and are furthermore, too easy.
My interview with Peter about Tom McCarthy’s book “C” is here.
I’ve always agreed with the view that – with science fiction – its predictive powers were the least important or least relevant aspect of its public profile. I always loved stuff like Orwell’s 1984, where he explicitly said “It’s 1948, reversed.” I liked writers that were doing allegorical, satirical, fantastical versions of everyday life.
That suggests that Dick’s work is dated to the ’60s and ’70s. And I thought of him very much in this framework, and not as an extrapolative writer… But I think that Dick saw the makings of the contemporary reality we experience so profoundly.
As I’ve mentioned previously, I wanted to like Chronic City more than I did. Dan Green has a comprehensive critique of the book (and Lethem’s post-modernism) at his blog The Reading Experience. Dan is, perhaps, less forgiving than I would be, but definitely smarter…
[W]hile Lethem’s work is consistent with much postmodern fiction in that it is essentially comic, the comedy of a novel like Chronic City is indeed much too gentle, too shy of the more corrosive humor of much postmodern comedy. It isn’t so much that the novel is short on “satiric bite” as that ultimately it is merely satire, a relatively mild critique of post-9/11 New York under Bloomberg, which has become inhospitable to its misfits and nonconformists.
An Ethics of Interrogation — Another stunning cover design by Isaac Tobin (via This Isn’t Happiness). My Q & A with Isaac here, if you missed it.
Hark! — Dave Howard interviews artist Kate Beaton about her comic Hark! A Vagrant for The Torontoist:
More Chris Ware posters seen at OMG Posters!
The Superhero/Villain Name Generator…
