Books, Design and Culture
The Swedish author Henning Mankell talks to NPR New’s Morning Edition about the 11th and possibly last Wallander novel The Troubled Man:
“Maybe I’m a little old-fashioned. In the times where everyone is talking about how everything is a process, I am keen on dots … you call them a period. I believe in periods. I really thought that now is the ending, to make the final period in the stories of Wallander.”
NPR NEWS MORNING EDITION: HENNING MANKELL
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Author Sarah Bakewell talks about How To Live: Or, A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer with Ramona Koval for ABC RN’s The Book Show:
THE BOOK SHOW: HOW TO LIVE, A LIFE OF MONTAIGNE
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A little digression from books/design for a Monday:
Eleanor Wachtel, host of Writers and Company, talks to American artist Richard Serra for her other CBC Radio show, Wachtel on the Arts:
CBC RADIO WACHTEL ON THE ARTS: RICHARD SERRA
(Image above: Schunnemunk Fork by Richard Serra, 1990-91. Photograph by Ken McCown, used under a Creative Commons License, from the Richard Serra Flickr Pool)
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Literary editor Lev Grossman (author of The Magicians) discusses why Time put Jonathan Franzen on the front cover the magazine of with Ramona Koval on ABC Radio National’s The Book Show:
ABC RADIO NATIONAL THE BOOK SHOW: LEV GROSSMAN
Comments closedIf you are still stewing over last night’s lacklustre Oscars (or even if your not), take a listen to Terry O’Reilly’s entertaining history of movie trailers for The Age of Persuasion. He kicks it off with this genius trailer for Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds:
And, for it’s worth, movie trailers were originally created to get people OUT of theatres, not into them. Brilliant.
Listen to The Age of Persuasion podcast:
CBC RADIO: AOP GOES TO THE MOVIES
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The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance, Edmund de Waal’s memoir about his extraordinary Jewish family and an inherited collection of ornamental Japanese carvings called netsuke, was on many of last year’s “best-of” lists and is high on my current ‘to-read’ list. The author talks about the book with Eleanor Wachtel on CBC Radio’s Writers & Company:
CBC Radio Writer’s & Co: Edmund de Waal Mp3
Edmund de Waal, who is also a successful ceramicist, is also profiled in The Guardian:
Comments closedDe Waal and his netsuke have been much discussed over the past seven or eight months, but even now he is “completely taken aback” by the success of a book which is an “odd matrix of personal obsessions”. (We talk in the upstairs room of his south London studio – downstairs are three kilns, his wheel and a bag of clay, ready for him to get to work in the afternoon.) Yet that it is so personal and springs from these obsessions (Japan, objects, memory), drawing on his expertise as a potter, is surely a clue to its enormous appeal. How things are made and handled, he writes, and what happens to them “has been central to my life for more than 30 years”.
Simon Garfield, author of Just My Type: A Book About Fonts, talks to Ramona Koval for The Book Show on ABC Radio National:
RN Book Show — Simon Garfield: Just My Type Mp3
Comments closedBen Fullerton, Director of User Experience at Method Design in San Francisco, talks to Nora Young about design that supports solitude and mindfulness for CBC Radio’s Spark:
CBC Spark: Ben Fullerton Designing for Solitude Mp3
(I love this idea).
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An interesting interview with John B. Thompson, author of Merchants of Culture: The Publishing Business in the Twenty-First Century, at Beyond the Book:
[R]eaders are going to be faced with a growing proliferation of possibilities in terms of the ways that they read and consume the written word, and people will make different choices about that. I think what we will see is some readers will migrate effortlessly into an electronic environment and will welcome the emergence of a variety of different ways to read texts online or in dedicated e-book readers or on iPads or other forms of device that will enable them to read in different ways and different contexts… Others will find it less attractive and will continue to value some aspects of the printed book that are important to them, because for many readers, books are not just reading devices. Books are cultural artifacts. They are social objects. They are indeed forms of art, which they like to own and possess and to put on a shelf and display and to share with others and to return to time and again and read on various occasions in the future. And they will continue to cherish that physical objective character of the printed book. And so, some will not choose to read in an online or an electronic form, because for them, the book matters as an object.
Beyond the Book John B. Thompson Mp3
(via MobyLives)
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