[Literature] No one cares about The Catcher in the Rye anymore it seems, but the world is all agog for the work of Dickens in these tough times. Articles cited by the New York Times’ Ideas Blog suggest Dickens is good for comfort, but not for learning how to live in the Great Recession. Who can we turn to? Perhaps the critic Thorstein Veblen.
Brain Food? Comfort Food.
Shunning Death
[Literature] The newest issue of Common-place asks Mark Schantz, author of Awaiting the Heavenly Country, “what the ‘death-denying’ culture of the contemporary United States might learn from the ‘death-embracing culture’ of our nineteenth-century forebearers?” He answers.
Do Not Review Books
[Whackjobs] …Unless you want to be mailed vaguely threatening objects or have a disgruntled author post your information and insult you on her widely-read Twitter feed.
"The time requisite to complete even this preliminary labour of reading books and collecting quotations proved so long, that several promoters of the undertaking died, and many became absorbed in other duties, before it was possible to take in hand the actual preparation of the intended Dictionary …"
—
— The Oxford English Dictionary Preface to Volume I A and B
[via Guardian Books]
To Infinity and... Page 63. For Now.
[Infinite Summer] Today begins Infinite Summer, a sort of online bookclub running from today until September 21. For the next three months, many of us will be wandering throughout David Foster Wallace’s 1,079-page novel Infinite Jest.
At first I thought, “Oh! This will be fun!” and then I actually went out to get a copy of the book yesterday and found it to be one of the most daunting images of my life. It is big. It is doable in three months, but it will most certainly take me all three of those months. I feel a bit like Harry Rent in Mark Sarvas’s novel Harry, Revised, in which the protagonist accepts the challenge to himself to read The Count of Monte Cristo, before contemplating which edition to buy: abridged or unabridged?
Of course, everything is easier to manage when you have friends helping you out. And while none of my friends see merit in the summer reading project (“Joe, you are such a loser!” one said to me yesterday as I described why I bought the book), there are plenty of people on Facebook, Twitter and other social networks chatting away about their reading to one another.
Everything will be okay.
"Things would be so much easier if I could just write myself."
[Tweeting] Twitter makes some people’s lives into open books. It’s especially simple when the subject of a Twitter feed is in fact already a book. @ColdCallingBook chronicles “the thoughts of an innocent book as it goes through the publishing process,” at 140 characters at a time.
There are plenty of downright funny updates (“I’ve just realized that I complain a lot in my tweets. Maybe I should have a better outlook? I mean, at least I’m not a romance novel.”) that certainly make me trust that the author, Mike Long, is entertaining before ever reading his book. I’ve added @ColdCallingBook to my followed users; we’ll see how this interesting new type of PR move will affect the book after its publication.
![[Album Art] I’ve recently been drawn into Belle & Sebastian’s album Tigermilk, and through various research and things I have come across an album by Isobel Campbell, Swansong for You, with art of similar composition.
I found it striking how well the two images went with one another: both are tinted black & white photos of a woman coddling an animal — in Swansong we see her holding close a cat, while in Tigermilk a woman appears to be breastfeeding a young tiger. There is a maternal essence prevalent in both images.
Their similarity cannot be a coincidence; Campbell was a member of the band Belle & Sebastian, which leads me to wonder if the album artworks were designed by the same person.](http://7.media.tumblr.com/Baf1fVEx4oq5k0p7px5xGgLUo1_500.jpg)
[Album Art] I’ve recently been drawn into Belle & Sebastian’s album Tigermilk, and through various research and things I have come across an album by Isobel Campbell, Swansong for You, with art of similar composition.
I found it striking how well the two images went with one another: both are tinted black & white photos of a woman coddling an animal — in Swansong we see her holding close a cat, while in Tigermilk a woman appears to be breastfeeding a young tiger. There is a maternal essence prevalent in both images.
Their similarity cannot be a coincidence; Campbell was a member of the band Belle & Sebastian, which leads me to wonder if the album artworks were designed by the same person.
Mona Lisa a Man? The Nude Version Doesn't Suggest So.
[Art] Some liked to muse that the Mona Lisa was in fact a man — or da Vinci himself! — painted as a woman. Now, a nude portrait that looks suspiciously similar to the woman with the mischievous smile has surfaced, and she is all female.
'Infinite Jest' Too Much for You?
[Literature] The Valve suggests another summer reading pick.
Recent Articles of Note
[Link Bundle] Some interesting finds in the past week or so:
- JD Salinger has filed a lawsuit to block the impending Catcher in the Rye (previously mentioned here) that nobody wants to read. [via Second Pass]
- José Saramago, one of my favorite writers (and author of Nobel Prize-winning novel Blindness), contributes a story to Issue 13 of Drawbridge. [via ReadySteadyBook]
- Frank Lloyd Wright takes an interest in LEGO.
- Because Google is never behind the times — and almost always ahead of them — the company plans to compete with Amazon by selling e-books. [via Maud Newton]
