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Published January 11, 2012

Midweek Miscellany

An interview with Jason Cohn, director of the documentary Eames: The Architect and The Painter, at Imprint:

Charles was extremely ambitious and maybe a little bit cut throat in his career. I do think that it was important to him to build a strong brand. The way that he used the image of them as a couple to publicize and self-promote was far thinking. I think that he and Ray intuited that when you are selling a mass-produced item like a chair or an iPod, it’s not quite enough to have something that is beautiful, works well and at the right price point. It helps when you can buy a tiny piece of the designer as well. Just like Steve Jobs did that with Apple, Ray and Charles did that with their furniture. When you were buying a piece of Eames furniture, you were buying a little bit of that joie de vivre, the free and easy California lifestyle, that Charles and Ray represented to a generation of people.

Jason Epstein reviews Richard Seaver’s memoir The Tender Hour of Twilight: Paris in the ’50s, New York in the ’60s: A Memoir of Publishing’s Golden Age for The New York Times:

In the spring of 1953 Seaver opened a letter from Barney Rosset, who had just acquired for a few thousand dollars the assets of Grove Press, a stillborn Greenwich Village publishing firm. Rosset said he was coming to France, and could Mr. Sea­ver introduce him to Beckett? Dick replied that Beckett was reclusive, but he should approach Beckett’s publisher, M. Jérôme Lindon at Les Éditions de Minuit. Rosset replied that he was now in touch with Minuit and had made an offer for Beckett in America. Rosset later asked Seaver to join him at Grove, and Dick, now married to the beautiful Jeannette Medina, a concert violinist who had recently won a scholarship to Juilliard, accepted. The ’60s would be a time of triumph and tragedy for Dick and Barney.

And on a not entirely unrelated note…

An obituary for George Whitman, owner of Shakespeare & Company, in The Telegraph:

Whitman displayed a blithe disregard for money, often informing customers that the book they were perusing was not for sale and remaining philosophical when the cash box disappeared — a regular occurrence. Yet while more commercially minded bookshops were being taken over or going to the wall, Whitman weathered the depredations of beat poets and hippies, and survived the 1968 student riots and numerous tax audits by the French authorities. Quite how he did it remained something of a mystery.

See also: The Guardian, The New York Times, The Economist and many more…

And finally…

Outsider Art — Alexander Chee interviews cartoonist Daniel Clowes for the BOMBlog:

I think the so-called acceptance of comics is all in the minds of journalists and desperate booksellers. My comics sold fairly well when it was a completely unknown underground thing and they seem to sell vaguely the same numbers now as they did then, it’s just a different audience. Back then it was only people involved in the underground culture and now it’s a general audience at bookstores… If you looked at the number of people who buy books there it would be a very small percentage of the population, far less than those who’d buy an indie movie. I mean, probably several million people saw the Ghost World movie, for example, but it’s in the hundreds of thousands for the book—a small percentage.

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Published January 26, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

A shiny new (and somewhat unsettling) cover for Joyland’s next e-book, How I Came to Haunt My Parents by Natalee Caple, designed by the shiny (and somewhat unsettling) David A Gee.

Holden Caulfield’s Goddam War — Vanity Fair excerpts J. D. Salinger: A Life by Kenneth Slawenski:

Tuesday, June 6, 1944, was the turning point of J. D. Salinger’s life. It is difficult to overstate the impact of D-day and the 11 months of combat that followed. The war, its horrors and lessons, would brand itself upon every aspect of Salinger’s personality and reverberate through his work. As a young writer before entering the army, Salinger had had stories published in various magazines, including Collier’s and Story, and he had begun to conjure members of the Caulfield family, including the famous Holden. On D-day he had six unpublished Caulfield stories in his possession, stories that would form the spine of The Catcher in the Rye. The experience of war gave his writing a depth and maturity it had lacked; the legacy of that experience is present even in work that is not about war at all. In later life, Salinger frequently mentioned Normandy, but he never spoke of the details—“as if,” his daughter later recalled, “I understood the implications, the unspoken.”

An excerpt from Jason Epstein’s review Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century by John B. Thompson for the latest NYRB:

Digital enthusiasts should… consider that as the embrace of other electronic media has widened, the average quality of their product has declined: from Masterpiece Theatre to Jersey Shore, from Franklin Roosevelt and Adlai Stevenson to Sarah Palin, from Julia Child to Rachael Ray. My own guess is that the digital future in which anyone can become a published writer will separate along the usual two paths, a narrow path toward more multilingual variety, specificity, and higher average quality and a broader path downward toward greater banality and incoherence, while the collective wisdom of the species, the infallible critic, will continue to preserve what is essential and over time discard the rest.

(The full review requires a subscription)

Best Online Comics Criticism 2010 chosen by contributors to The Comics Journal. And from that list, film scholar David Bordwell on Tintin (via Robot6):

Most commentators on Hergé mention that he was a film fan and drew many situations from movies of the 1920s and 1930s. Like Hollywood studio cinema, his tales put striking technique in the service of fluent storytelling. Pause to study the narrative and you’ll find a surprising richness to the imagery; start by looking at the pictures as pictures, and you’ll see how composition, color, and detail smoothly advance the action. Hergé was well aware that his polished imagery could stand scrutiny in its own right, but he saw it as serving a larger narrative dynamic.

(Out of curiosity, does anyone compile annual list of the best online literary criticism?)

Montaigne and Monkeys — Saul Frampton, author of the ridiculously titled  When I Am Playing With My Cat, How Do I Know She Is Not Playing With Me?: Montaigne and Being in Touch With Life, on 16th Century French philosopher Michel-de-Montaigne and neuroscience in The Guardian:

For Montaigne, as for contemporary neuroscientists, humans… have an inbuilt imitative, sympathetic capacity. Moreover, he does not see it as species-dependent… In one of his most famous aphorisms he asks: “When I am playing with my cat, how do I know she is not playing with me?” And he tells how animals themselves form “a certain acquaintance with one another” and greet each other “with joy and demonstrations of goodwill”. Then, in a lengthy comment added to the final edition of his essays, he completes the circle from animal-to-human to human-to-human again, concluding that we cannot help but communicate ourselves in some way… even if it is something to which we are habitually blind…

And finally  (in the unlikely case anyone missed it)…

Caustic Cover Critic interviews Christopher King, the new Art Director at Melville House Publishing.

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