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Tag: james lasdun

Published June 8, 2012

Something for the Weekend

A stunning jacket design by the great Isaac Tobin for After Freud Left, published by University of Chicago Press.

You can read my interview with Isaac from 2009 here.

Bauhütte to Bauhaus — A fascinating overview of the Bauhaus by Frank Whitford, author of the Thames & Hudson ‘World of Art’ book Bauhaus,  for the TLS:

The structure of the Bauhaus… followed, as Gropius thought, medieval principles. He coined the school’s name so as to echo the word Bauhütte, in the Middle Ages the German for a guild of masons, builders and decorators. And the teaching was based on specialist workshops where you learned your trade by carrying out actual projects, graduating from apprentice to journeyman and master. The teachers were at first called Masters and not Professors, a revolution in a country where academic snobbery was the norm.

Calligraphica — A new tumblr devoted to calligraphy and hand drawn type (pictured above: ‘One Hope One Quest’, by Greg Papagrigoriou).

Persuasion — Michael Bierut talks to Designers & Books about his collection 79 Short Essays on Design:

Even the best designers have to persuade people all the time. They have to persuade people to hire them; then they have to persuade people to go with the recommended solution; then they have to persuade people to realize that solution in the best possible way. Simply showing someone a nice design is almost never enough. This constant effort—and all the rejection that inevitably ensues—obviously requires healthy confidence and nerves of steel, if not a strong ego.

And finally…

Critic James Lasdun reviews The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus for The Guardian:

Language, the debasement, banality and ultimate toxicity thereof, is his subject. It’s a staple topic of avant garde literature, from the Prenzlauer Berg writers of the former East Germany to the Language poets of the American academy. All proceed, more or less, on the basis that verbal communication has been fatally corrupted by political or literary abuse and can be rescued only by a total dismantling and reassembly. Results vary (I’ve yet to read a Language poem that didn’t make me want to dissolve it in acid), but Marcus’s own, especially in The Age of Wire and String, have been haunting and inventive.

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Published May 11, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Half Crazy — Matt Dorfman on his great book cover design for The Psychopath Test by Jon Ronson, published by Riverhead Books:

Riverhead did not skimp on the production touches for this one. They sprung for a combination gritty matte finish (which covers the white paper portions of the jacket) and a shiny gloss for the yellow/magenta “crazy” half, thereby giving your sense of touch a noticeable edge if you find yourself blindly scanning your shelf for this book in a dark room (which I have done).

The Intimate Orwell — Simon Leys reviews Diaries by George Orwell, edited by Peter Davison, and George Orwell: A Life in Letters also edited and annotated by Davison, for the NYRB:

From the very start, literature was always Orwell’s first concern. This is constantly reflected in his correspondence: since early childhood “I always knew I wanted to write.” This statement is repeated in various forms, all through the years, till the end. But it took him a long time (and incredibly hard work) to discover what to write and how to write it. (His first literary attempt was a long poem, eventually discarded.) Writing novels became his dominant passion—and an accursed ordeal: “writing a novel is agony.” He finally concluded (some would say accurately), “I am not a real novelist.” And yet shortly before he died he was still excitedly announcing to his friend and publisher Fredric Warburg, “I have a stunning idea for a very short novel.”

Investigative Self-Repair — Author James Lasdun (It’s Beginning to Hurt) reviews Edward St. Aubyn’s latest semi-autobiographical Patrick Melrose novel At Last for The Guardian:

This act of investigative self-repair has all along been the underlying project of these extraordinary novels. It is the source of their urgent emotional intensity, and the determining principle of their construction. Not much gets into these books that doesn’t bear directly on Patrick’s predicament. Exposition is kept to a minimum; there are few descriptive passages, no digressions. For all their brilliant social satire, they are closer to the tight, ritualistic poetic drama of another era than the expansive comic fiction of our own.

And finally…

The General Specialist — Designer, illustrator, and letterer Jessica Hische talks to Method & Craft:

I love learning about new things whether or not they directly connect to how I earn a living and I think that this desire to pay attention to related industries is one of the reasons why I’m a figure in the design community. It’s by learning about many things that you’re able to understand specialization—that design is broken into countless micro-industries. If you don’t understand the differences between them (or acknowledge that they exist), there is no way for you to find your own specialized niche with in it.

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