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Published December 8, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Curate, Curate, Curate — An interview with James Daunt, the new managing director of Waterstone’s, in The Independent:

“You have to let the booksellers decide how to curate their own stock,” he says. “The skill of a good bookseller is how you juxtapose your titles, and create interesting displays, and reflect what your community wants… The computer screen is a terrible environment in which to select books. All that ‘If you read this, you’ll like that’ – it’s a dismal way to recommend books. A physical bookshop in which you browse, see, hold, touch and feel books is the environment you want.”

An epic three–part interview with the ever-quotable Alan Moore at Honest Publishing:

[T]he people actually producing technology, such as Kindle and iPad, these are always the people who are telling us that we have to have these things. And being the type of creatures that we are, a fair number of us will naturally fall into that, will perhaps assume that as a status symbol it’s much better to be seen reading a Kindle than a dog-eared paperback. Although I will note that the last two or three times I’ve taken train journeys, everybody around me was sitting round reading a dog-eared paperback. I tend to think that for most people the idea of the book, with its easy portability, where you can turn the corner of a page down, where you are basically working with ordinary, reflected light rather than screen radiance, I think that the book will end up as the reading method of choice.

See also: A full, unabridged version of Laura Sneddon’s interview with Moore for The Independent.

And on the subject of authors with beards…

Neal Stephenson, author most recently of REAMDE, talks to The New York Times about the future:

What I’m kind of hoping is that this is just kind of a pause, while we assimilate this gigantic new thing, ubiquitous computing and the Internet. And that at some point we’ll turn around and say, ‘Well, that was interesting — we have a whole set of new tools and capabilities that we didn’t have before the whole computer/Internet thing came along…Now let’s get back to work doing interesting and useful things.’

And finally…

Terry Gilliam talks movies with the LA Times:

“The thing is, some really good scripts come my way, but there’s nothing in them for me to come to grips with, they are complete in themselves,” Gilliam said. “There’s no uncertainty. I don’t look for answers; I look for questions. I like when people leave the cinema and feel like the world has been altered for them somewhat. On ‘Brazil,’ I know a woman who said she saw the film, went home and later that night she just started weeping. I also heard about an attorney who saw the film and then locked himself in his office for three days. Fantastic.”

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Published October 12, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Art or Death — Art Spiegelman on books, comics and technology at Publishers Weekly:

I would say that, in the future, the book will be reserved for things that function best as a book. So, if I need a textbook that’s going to be out of date because of new technological inventions, you’re better off having it where you can download the supplements or the update. If you’re going to read a quick mystery novel to keep you amused while you’re traveling, it’s fine.
None of this is about the business model. It has to do with the boutique nature of a book, the idea that, as McLuhan put it, when a technology is replaced by another technology, the previous technology either becomes art or it dies.

See also: Jeet Heer reviews MetaMaus for the Globe and Mail:

One way to explain the achievement of MetaMaus is to imagine a great architect like Frank Gehry offering a guided tour to one of his classic buildings, opening up the original plans, explaining the solutions he came up with for each problem. Such an act of self-exegesis is immensely rewarding, even if the creator’s genius is as enigmatic as ever.

And, on the subject of comics… A short interview with Alan Moore in Metro:

At the moment I feel an awful lot of my comic career is behind me, particularly all of the superhero stuff – the stuff that’s owned by American corporations. I want to distance myself from that, so the stuff I’m proudest of is what I own: From Hell, Lost Girls, The League Of Extraordinary Gentlemen. I don’t read my earlier work because there are too many unpleasant associations with it. I don’t have a copy of Watchmen in the house. I’m glad the work is out there in the world, having an effect, but it’s like I’ve gone through a messy divorce.

Immersion — Author Neal Stephenson talks about writing and his new novel REAMDE at Full Stop:

I would say that people who like to engage with the details of the historical era or the technical concepts might find [my] books especially rewarding to read. For me it’s a pretty straightforward thing—you know, what readers are paying for, what they’re buying and what I’m selling is a particular kind of experience: essentially one of getting immersed in another world. And it could be a very different world (as in a science fiction book), it could be the history of our world, or it could just be a story that takes place today, like Reamde. And a way to do that — a way to create that feeling of immersion and get the reader feeling like they’re really there — is to supply a lot of details that convey a feeling of immediacy.

See also: REAMDE reviewed by Laura Miller for The Guardian.

And finally…

Filmmaker Gary Hustwit talks about his latest design documentary, Urbanized, with Print Magazine:

I love all the interviews in all the films, that’s why they are in the film. But there are definitely some that people respond to when they watch the film. Most of all Enrique Peñalosa, who is the former mayor of Bogota. He’s got some great lines in the film, like “There’s no constitutional right to parking.” He’s really charismatic and has some really common sense ideas about using the city as a tool to create equality, democracy and social equity. I also got to interview Oscar Niemeyer, the legendary Brazilian modernist architect. He’s about to turn 104 and is the oldest living architect in the world. He’s got his grandchildren working in his office. That was a big honor for sure.

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Published October 7, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Innovation Starvation— SF author Neal Stephenson at World Policy Journal on why the big stuff doesn’t get done:

SF has changed… from the 1950s (the era of the development of nuclear power, jet airplanes, the space race, and the computer) to now. Speaking broadly, the techno-optimism of the Golden Age of SF has given way to fiction written in a generally darker, more skeptical and ambiguous tone. I myself have tended to write a lot about hackers—trickster archetypes who exploit the arcane capabilities of complex systems devised by faceless others.

Believing we have all the technology we’ll ever need, we seek to draw attention to its destructive side effects. This seems foolish now that we find ourselves saddled with technologies like Japan’s ramshackle 1960’s-vintage reactors at Fukushima when we have the possibility of clean nuclear fusion on the horizon. The imperative to develop new technologies and implement them on a heroic scale no longer seems like the childish preoccupation of a few nerds with slide rules. It’s the only way for the human race to escape from its current predicaments. Too bad we’ve forgotten how to do it.

See also:  Stephenson’s new book REAMDE reviewed by The A.V. Club and the NY Times.

Stealing from Dr. Strange — Lev Grossman, author of The Magicians and The Magician King, talks to Graphic Novel Reporter about comics:

Watchmen (and, just as much, Miracleman) changed everything for me. [Alan] Moore attacked and undermined everything that was sacred about the superhero story, and in the process he wrote the greatest superhero story that had ever been written. I never forgot that. A lot of those lessons show up in The Magicians: When you question the basic assumptions of a genre, you make that genre stronger, not weaker.

Also, I steal a lot from Dr. Strange.

And on the subject of comics… Ruth Franklin reviews MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman for The New Republic:

This writer is not Elie Wiesel or Primo Levi, though his work, like theirs, is based in testimony. He is not Piotr Rawicz or H.G. Adler, though he shares their interest in viewing real events through a filter of surrealism. He is not Thomas Keneally, though his work has a quality of the “nonfiction novel” about it; nor is he W.G. Sebald, though his books, like Sebald’s, have been described as a mix of fiction, documentary, and memoir. He is Art Spiegelman, and he has done more than any other writer of the last few decades to change our understanding of the way stories about the Holocaust can be written.

Edges — Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, on what remains of books:

One of the essential characteristics of the printed book, as of the scribal codex that preceded it, is its edges. Those edges, as John Updike pointed out not long before he died, manifest themselves in the physical form of bound books – “some are rough-cut, some are smooth-cut, and a few, at least at my extravagant publishing house, are even top-stained” — but they are also there aesthetically and even metaphysically, giving each book integrity as a work in itself. That doesn’t mean that a book exists in isolation — its words, as written and as read, form rich connections with other books as well as with the worlds of nature and of men — but rather that a book offers a self-contained experience. The sense of self-containment is what makes a good book so satisfying to its readers, and the requirement of self-containment is what spurs the writer to the highest levels of literary achievement. The book must feel complete between its edges.

And finally…

In The Wall Street Journal, Lee Marshall looks for Fellini’s Rome:

Sometimes Fellini’s Rome and Felliniesque Rome live in close proximity. The apartment that Federico and Giulietta shared (Via Margutta, 110) is on a small, charming street where Truman Capote once lived and Puccini composed. There’s not much to see except a plaque on the building with caricatures of the pair and a commemorative poem in Roman dialect. But notice the number on the door of the palazzo: above the 110, it says “Già 113″—formerly 113—a very Felliniesque address.

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Published September 3, 2010

Something for the Weekend

What Do You Do With These Things? — Andrew Pettegree, author of The Book in the Renaissance, interviewed at the Boston Globe (via The Second Pass):

What you’ve got to do once you’ve got 300 identical copies of a book is you’ve got to sell it to people who don’t even yet know they want it. And that’s a very, very different way of selling…

It’s this classic example of how you get technological innovation without people really being aware of the commercial implications, of how you can make money from it. There’s quite a little similarity in the first generation of print with the dot-com boom and bust of the ’90s, where people have this fantastic new innovation, a lot of creative energy is put into it, a lot of development capital is put into it, and then people say, “Well, yeah, but how are we going to make money…?”

Your Brain on Gadgets — NPR looks at digital overload:

The average person today consumes almost three times as much information as what the typical person consumed in 1960, according to research at the University of California, San Diego.

And The New York Times reports that the average computer user checks 40 websites a day and can switch programs 36 times an hour.

“It’s an onslaught of information coming in today,” says Times technology journalist Matt Richtel.

Digital Horde — Fast Company on the launch of The Mongoliad, Neal Stephenson’s experiment with digital storytelling and social media:

The innovation in The Mongoliad… [is] in the entire concept of a serialized, dynamic, digital “book” that includes video, imagery, music, and background articles among the text of the storyline and comes with a social media companion, with which fans/readers can comment and interact. The social aspect even goes so far as including badges, the new digital “reward” phenomenon, which readers can earn for taking part in particular activities. The book will be available online via a browser, and also through dedicated apps for Apple iDevices and Android phones.

There’s more about the venture at The New York Times. At what point, however, does this stop being a novel and start being a game? Can we tell anymore…?

This Is Our Niche — Steven Heller talks to Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore and editor Eva Prinz about Ecstatic Peace Library for the The New York Times:

Moore and Prinz believe that the analog and digital are more distinct in books than in other media. “To say that an art book can be an e-book is ignorant of the tradition and art of color separations, printing and binding,” Prinz said. “Likewise, to suspect that a digital storytelling experience is simply a pdf downloaded on your iPad or Kindle platform is disrespectful to the interactive arts and artists.” She has been experimenting with video game technology to create their first e-book. “In similar processes to those employed by the 1960s experimental subcommittee of the College de Pataphysique, a group of French writers and poets who called themselves OuLiPo (Ouvroir de litterature potentielle),” Prinz continued, “Ecstatic Peace Library is creating new ways to ‘escape’ into literature and art.”

The Wolf Hall Effect — Intelligent Life looks at the growing respectability of  historical fiction in the wake of Hilary Mantel’s Booker Prize winning novel.

And finally…

Little Acts of Civil Disobedience — A profile of book designer Peter Mendelsund by Stefan Kamph from 2009 that I hadn’t seen previously (thx Jacob):

Moments of humor and surprise in a cover are a designer’s “little acts of civil disobedience,” says Mendelsund, and he “would like to think that if you’re a good reader there are little exegetical clues you can sneak in.” The court artist hides his private mark in the appointed painting.

Peter also recently posted his beautiful designs for the Steig Larsson deluxe boxed set at his blog JACKET MECHANICAL.

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