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The Casual Optimist Posts

Published December 5, 2011

Raincoast Spring Books

I was out west for the Raincoast Books spring 2012 sales conference last week. Sadly I didn’t get to see much of Vancouver or catch up with half the people I meant to, but I did get to hear about a lot of great new books including one about building (and losing) an android Philip K. Dick. It’s non-fiction. Thanks Henry Holt!

Henry Holt also have a new novel by Herta Mueller, winner of the Nobel Prize in 2009, called The Hunger Angel, and the latest from John Banville’s alter-ego Benjamin Black, Vengeance.

Picador are publishing a collected edition of Edward St. Aubyn’s Patrick Melrose trilogy in January — the first time they’ve all been properly available in the US I believe — to coincide with the US edition of his new book At Last (Farrar, Strauss & Giroux). They also have a collection of essays by Siri Hustvedt, Living, Thinking, Looking.

While there was nothing on the list quite of the magnitude of this season’s long-awaited Saul Bass: A Life in Film and Design, there are a few art and design titles that caught my eye. Princeton Architectural Press are publishing Woodcut, a book of beautiful prints by artist Bryan Nash Gill (you have surely have seen his work even if you don’t recognise the name immediately) and Up on the Roof, a collection of photographs by Alex MacLean of New York’s hidden rooftop spaces. They are also publishing a long overdue paperback edition of Michael Bierut’s Seventy-Nine Short Essays on Design, and a paperback edition of the beautiful, if overlooked, Typography Sketchbooks by Steven Heller and Lita Talarico. Lawrence King are publishing a new book on the history of picture books, Children’s Picturebooks: The Art of Visual Storytelling by Martin Salisbury and Morag Styles,  and a new edition of The End of Print by David Carson.

On the comics side, Drawn & Quarterly are publishing Jerusalem: Chronicle from the Holy City, the latest travelogue from Guy Delisle who previous books include The Burma Chronicles, Pyongyang and Shenzhen. D+Q are also publishing a new edition of Chester Brown’s controversial, scatological and long out-of-print comic Ed The Happy Clown.

I’m also looking forward to finally seeing more of Baby’s in Black: Astrid Kirchherr, Stuart Sutcliffe, and The Beatles in Hamburg by Arne Bellstorf which is being published by First Second in April (I just wish they’d gone in a different direction with the typography on the cover — the German and UK edition’s  have lovely swooping hand-drawn lettering).

And lastly — because I am big nerd and recently finished his earlier book Batman Unmasked — I’m excited about Will Brooker’s Hunting the Dark Knight: Twenty-First Century Batman, which is being published by I. B. Tauris in July.

Now, back to the Toronto grindstone…

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Published November 30, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

And The Moral Is Don’t Fuck William Faulkner… A really great post by Glen David Gold, author of Sunnyside and Carter Beats the Devil, at the LA Review Books:

The world after publication is — beyond its many joys — an evaporating and ruinous goldfish bowl of thwarted ambition. If you write long enough, you will know editors and agents. You will have dinner with people who give interesting fellowships to weeklong retreats in the south of France. You will teach at good programs and you might know when a publisher’s child is having a birthday and what his favorite Transformer is, and these facts more than the quality of your humanity might be what makes you a chess piece when another writer slaps you on the back and asks you if you might read something he wrote.

Very Long, Very Tricky, Very Strange — Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker on the appeal of Tolkien and fantasy novels:

Of all the unexpected things in contemporary literature, this is among the oddest: that kids have an inordinate appetite for very long, very tricky, very strange books about places that don’t exist, fights that never happened, all set against the sort of medieval background that Mark Twain thought he had discredited with “A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court.”

Against Bigness — Mark Edmundson on the movies of Robert Altman and Woody Allen at The American Scholar:

Altman was against bigness. He always wanted to turn the carpet over. He wanted you to see the signs of strain and stress that went into the making of what looked like a serene, well-balanced thing. But he didn’t want to debunk the whole construction; he simply wanted to marvel at the quirky congestion of threads. It was probably tough for the players who acted prominently in his movies to redeem their Hollywood standing. He turned stars into hand-held sparklers. He waved them around. But he did it without resentment, without meanness: he simply liked them better that way.

Meanwhile in the comics corner…

Alan Moore talks to Fast Company about  a Kickstarter project to build a memorial to the late Harvey Pekar in Cleveland Heights public library, and to The Guardian about the Occupy Movement wearing V for Vendetta masks at protests.

And at The Daily Telegraph, Kasia Boddy reviews MetaMaus by Art Spiegelman:

The effect of this great assemblage is complicated. On the one hand, it consolidates Maus’s status as a canonical work, about which we need to know everything, and emphasises its claim to historical testimony (Spiegelman complained to The New York Times when Maus was included on the fiction bestseller list.) On the other hand, however, the almost overwhelming presence of all this stuff emphasises that history is far from a straightforward retrieval of “facts”, but rather involves a complex process of accumulation, sifting and construction.

And finally…

Martin Filler reviews the documentary Eames: The Architect and the Painter for NYRB:

The last time I saw Ray Eames, a few months before her death, I mentioned the high prices that the couple’s original furniture was fetching in New York galleries. “Oh, no,” she cried, and held her hands to her ears in genuine dismay. “We wanted our things be available to everyone, not just rich people.” Yet although the Eameses’ molded plywood LCW chair of 1946 at first retailed for $20.95, their rosewood-and-leather lounge and ottoman of 1956 cost a not-inconsiderable $578 when first introduced, and now, still in production by Herman Miller, sells for $4,499. This luxurious seating became a familiar component of upscale psychiatrists’ consultation rooms, as much an emblem of mid-century professional attainment as pairs of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’e chrome-and-leather Barcelona chairs were in the reception areas of Fortune 500 companies.

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Published November 25, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Jacob Covey’s stunning cover for Nancy Is Happy: Complete Dailies 1943-1945 due in March 2012 from Fantagraphics.

Anxiety and Time — Adam Roberts, author of By Light Alone, on science fiction at The Browser:

The common belief that SF is in some sense “about” the future isn’t wholly wrongheaded. One feature of 19th and 20th century science fiction is that it is fascinated with time in a deep way. Time only opens up, as a wholly new dimension to be imaginatively explored, at the very end of the 18th century. It’s a puzzle, actually, why this should be. [The critic] Darko Suvin thinks it has something to do with the French Revolution. But before about 1800 people almost never wrote stories set in the future, and then after 1800 lots of people did just that. SF as a mode of projecting oneself into the to-come connects powerfully with human concerns in the way that specific prophesy – pedantic, fiddly, bound to be wrong – doesn’t.

Writing Machines — Tom McCarthy on technology in The Guardian:

I must belong to the only generation of writers who’ve written with all three of inkpen, typewriter and computer. It definitely matters: the technology colours not only the rhythm but the whole logic of what you write. Think of Kafka’s obsession with writing machines: the harrow that inscribes the law onto the skin in In the Penal Colony or the mysterious writing desk in Amerika: writing technologies themselves are imbued with terrifying and sacred dimensions, and become the subject, not just the medium, of the story. I used to have a beautiful old German typewriter, that you had to throw your fingers at and the keys would smash into the roller. It felt like a machine-gun or something.

And finally…

Brian Appleyard on Andy Warhol for Intelligent Life magazine:

Warhol now endorses a way of life. One simple technology—silk-screen printing—dominated his career. But it was enough to show today’s technology-laden, hyper-connected youth that they could do it too. With the instant publication of digital pictures and videos, anybody can become a cyber-Warhol, swimming in the great ocean that pop imagery has become. Apple’s Photo Booth software reduces the whole thing to a single click—just by selecting “pop art” under “effects” you can change your face into a very credible Warhol multiple self-portrait. Andy, in death, is a generation’s mentor.

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Published November 24, 2011

Francis Ford Coppola at TIFF

You know, what was top of my mind when I was making [“The Conversation”] was I wanted to make the film as beautiful as “Blow-Up.” You know, I had seen “Blow-Up” by Michelangelo Antonioni and I said boy, that’s the kind of film I – those were the kind of films I want to make. I – something that’s unique and it occupies its own kind of thing, and I made “The Conversation.” I sat down to write that after being so enthusiastic about seeing “Blow-Up.” And throughout my career, I have seen great films that have just filled me with pleasure and said, I want to make a film like that. And I think that’s OK for young people to do, you know, because it’s impossible. You set out to imitate something you thought was beautiful but in the end you can’t. You’re going to end up with what you have to say, you know?

Broadcast by NPR’s Fresh Air, director Francis Ford Coppola discusses his career with Cameron Bailey, the co-director of the Toronto International Film Festival, and answers questions from the festival audience:

NPR FRESH AIR: Francis Ford Coppola Reflects On His Career mp3

You can read the transcript of the interview here.

AND if you’ve never seen Coppola’s 1974 film The Conversation, you really should make time to watch it…

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Published November 23, 2011

Midweek Miscellany

Design Auteur — Steven Heller on Erik Nitsche for Print Magazine:

For some, book publishing was akin to the Internet of the sixties and seventies, a means of communicating information to large numbers in large volumes. In this milieu Nitsche practiced design auteurship before it was given a name, and the body of work he produced is extraordinary even by today’s standards. After moving to Geneva in the early 1960s Nitsche Founded ENI, S.A. (Erik Nitsche International) to produce some of the finest illustrated history books ever designed. The first series, a twelve volume The New Illustrated Library of Science and Invention, with a multilingual print run of over two million copies, covered the histories of communication, transport, photography, architecture, astronomy, and the machine, and flight… The second ENI series on the History of Music was even more ambitious — twenty volumes — that covered an expansive range of musical experience from composition to instrumentation, from classical to jazz.

Our Dreams of Ourselves — An interview with Alan Moore in The Independent:

Moore was always ahead of the times with respect to female fans – unlike much of the comics industry, – and was the creator of the revolutionary The Ballad of Halo Jones, a sci-fi strip to run alongside Judge Dredd in the UK comic 2000AD. First appearing in 1984, Halo was one of the first non-superhero women to headline her own series, at a time when most girls’ comics had folded.

“There wasn’t a single – I mean, I was annoyed – there wasn’t a single girls’ comic in Britain,” Moore remembers. “I thought, well if you do more stories that are aimed at women, you’ll get more women reading the comics. It would seem fairly simple and straightforward, but there was a lot of resistance [to the idea].”

Insane, Not Crazy — Chip Kidd, book designing Bat-thusiast, reviews The Joker: A Visual History of the Clown Prince of Crime by Daniel Wallace:

Created by artist Jerry Robinson and writer Bill Finger in 1940 for “Batman” issue #1—though Batman himself first appeared in “Detective Comics” #27 the previous year—the Joker, with his garish purple suit, ashen skin and emerald hair, was imagined as the maniacally taunting yang to Batman’s unrelentingly stern yin. Thus was born perhaps the single most classic pair of adversaries in comics history. Really, does it get any better than the Dark Knight Detective and the Harlequin of Hate matching wits and ultimately duking it out? I don’t think so.

Step by Step — Umberto Eco talks about his new book The Prague Cemetery at The Paris Review:

For me, the process of writing usually takes six years. In those years I collect material, I write, I rewrite. I am in a sort of a private world of myself with my characters. I don’t know what will happen. I discover it step by step. And I become very sad when the novel is finished because there is no more pleasure, no more surprise.

And finally…

Melvyn Bragg on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath for The Guardian:

It was the bestselling book in America in 1939. A film version starring Henry Fonda and directed by John Ford followed, itself a classic. Arthur Miller wrote of Steinbeck, “I can’t think of another American writer, with the possible exception of Mark Twain, who so deeply penetrated the political life of the country.” And yet Steinbeck was also called “a liar”, “a communist” and “a Jew acting for Zionist-Communist interests”. The book was burned in the streets; it was banned in schools and libraries, with its explicit sexuality given as the excuse. It was virulently attacked in Congress, and Steinbeck’s subsequent success in Russia eroded his reputation from the cold war onwards. He bought himself a revolver for self-defence and had good reason to fear for his life. The book has sold about 14m copies and still sells steadily.

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Published November 23, 2011

In the Cube: Michael Bierut and James Biber

In this video for Designers and Books, graphic designer and Pentagram partner Michael Bierut chats with architect James Biber about the books he selected for the site. The setting is the Rachel Whiteread-like library, or “book cube”, in Biber’s architectural office, located on the 2oth floor of Cass Gilbert’s Woolworth Building in downtown Manhattan:

The full, unabridged, 30-minute conversation can be seen here.

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Published November 22, 2011

Design Matters with Brian Rea

In the latest Design Matters podcast, Debbie Millman interviews artist and illustrator Brian Rea. The former art director for the Op-Ed page of The New York Times, Rea recently illustrated three of Malcolm Gladwell’s most popular books for a new boxed-set, Malcolm Gladwell Collected, designed by Paul Sahre:

DESIGN MATTERS: Brian Rea mp3

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Published November 21, 2011

Fictions | Peter Mendelsund

Knopf designer Peter Mendelsund has just posted the second of his meditations on designing book covers for fiction:

When setting out to design a book jacket for a work of fiction, whether we are aware of it or not, we designers are picking our subject matter from a limited set of bins. Though the choices we can make as designers are unlimited, the categories that define most of the choices we make when we pluck these ideas from their native fictions, are, on the face of it, quite easy to list.

Well worth reading all the way through, including the extensive footnotes.

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Published November 18, 2011

Erik Spiekermann: Typography in the Digital Domain

In this 10-minute film by Johnny Daukes for Microsoft UK,  typographer Erik Spiekermann talks type with Elliot Jay Stocks, founder of 8 Faces magazine:

(via I Love Typography)

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Published November 18, 2011

Something for the Weekend

Terror! — Amis on Don DeLillo and his new book The Angel Esmeralda: Nine Stories in The New Yorker:

DeLillo is the laureate of terror, of modern or postmodern terror, and the way it hovers and shimmers in our subliminal minds. As Eric Hobsbawm has said, terrorism is a new kind of urban pollution, and the pollutant is an insidious and chronic disquiet. Such is the air DeLillo breathes.

It’s Only One Book — A great interview with Art Spiegelman about his new book MetaMaus at The Comics Journal:

[Maus] took me thirteen years to do without any map of how to do it. No matter what somebody says now about graphic novels, this was made without any instruction manual. I didn’t know how to make a comic that was built to be reread, and that held up as it got reread, and be built over such a large span of time. There wasn’t something for me to look at. I guess there were long mangas out there, but I wasn’t that into them. They weren’t translated back when Maus was made. So I didn’t have any way to structure this, and structure is so basic to how I perceive. So I’m stuck with something that took a lot of me to make. So what can one do after it without either betraying it or capitulating to it? It’s an ongoing struggle.

Optimistic — An interview with Toronto’s indie comics heroine Annie Koyama at Comic Books Resources:

I was never under the impression that anyone was getting rich publishing the kinds of books and comics I chose to do but hopefully by staying a certain size, you can at least sustain the business and continue to break out new artists. I’m still figuring out what works and what doesn’t, but it’s nice to see others out there taking risks on new talent too.

Because I wasn’t saddled with preconceived notions of how things worked, I of course made some mistakes but I was also freer to carve my own road. In Toronto, where I’m located, most of the art bookstores have closed but we have one of the best and most supportive comic stores anyway, The Beguiling. I would still personally rather read a book that I hold in my hands, but you cannot ignore the digital content that’s available to anyone now. So, for now, I remain optimistic.

And while we’re on the subject of comics:

An obituary of comics historian Les Daniels, author of Comix: History of Comic Books In America, in the New York Times:

 Mark Evanier, a comic-book writer and historian, said that before Mr. Daniels, “nobody thought to write the history of the industry,” adding that “back then, it was a sloppily run, disposable business that no one thought would exist for long.”

“He was a guy that publishers hired to come in and figure out the histories of their own companies,” Mr. Evanier continued, “and he produced major works upon which all future histories will be built.”

See also: Tom Spurgeon’s more expansive obituary at The Comics Reporter.

And finally…

The Creative Review previews Polish Cold War Neon, a new book by photographer Ilona Karwinska. Putting it on the Christmas list…

 

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Published November 17, 2011

Literary Devices

The Random Analogy Generator and other literary devices from Grant Snider:

(via This Isn’t Happiness)

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Published November 17, 2011

Terence Conran: The Way We Live Now

The Guardian architecture and design critic Jonathan Glancey talks to 80-year-old design doyen and entrepreneur Terence Conran about his work and a new exhibition at the Design Museum celebrating his contribution to British design:

Interestingly, Habitat, the store Conran opened in 1964, was inspired by the books of Elizabeth David. Growing up in England, both David’s cookbooks and Habitat furniture were a constant presence in our house.

(via Coudal)

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