[Film] “Choose Your Own Adventure” books may be lame and camp nowadays. So naturally, you reinvent the idea on YouTube, with interesting results.
[Film] “Choose Your Own Adventure” books may be lame and camp nowadays. So naturally, you reinvent the idea on YouTube, with interesting results.
[Art] I was delighted to find a second comic strip by Chris Ware in a magazine recently. This time, it was in Bookforum. In their current issue’s special section “Fiction Forward,” Ware contributes a strip describing “how the falseness of fiction fosters an environment for certain truths to flourish while non-fiction kills them.” Read the feature here or simply the comic alone here.
Also contributing to this issue of Bookforum is the always-loved Maud Newton, who writes a review.
[Literature] This week’s New York Times Book Review is all about summer reading for those of you without a clue for how to spend the next couple of months.
Also: a reminder that Infinite Summer begins tomorrow!
[Cross-Breeds] A lot of people are talking about Kanye West’s book Thank You and You’re Welcome, and not too many have good to say of it. Why? It is a paltry 52-page book, with simple inspirational advice on how to be happy with what life gives you; it’s small, it is by a man whom called himself a “proud non-reader” and was co-written by someone who was not Kanye West. But does that make it a bad thing?
Note that, while West may not claim to be much of a reader himself, that quality does not forever dismiss him from branching out his typical sphere of influence. It is not so much the quality of the book that critics bemoan — how many cutesy, small inspirational books exist on the shelves already! — but rather the contrast between West and the literary persona one may associate with writing books.
As far as marketing goes, a book is not a bad idea — but could have been handled by West better: Think of artists who release companion books with new albums (such as the small book that released with Amanda Palmer’s album Who Killed Amanda Palmer?, written by acclaimed author Neil Gaiman.) West may have benefitted more if his book was released alongside an album, giving it a more obvious purpose and better exposure to fans than something that seems to simply confuse snobbish critics.
In today’s industry, to be an artist is to be a brand; one must promote his brand through as many different mediums as possible — including literary — to gain as much attention as one can. And who can think of a better way than a small book, whose non-intimidating size may attract those not used to reading for pleasure and also allow communication from an artist to his fans (and provide inspiration and hope for success — a very hot topic in today’s economy.)
[Tweeting] I’ve been following the story of @EarthboundHero on Twitter lately: it’s a first-person account of the events from the 1989 videogame Mother. Being a huge fan of the game’s sequel and having never the chance to play the original, I was highly interested in @EarthboundHero’s Twitter feed.
Despite the 140-character limit, Twitter is proving to be an interesting way to gobble a story. How many checked the Twitter account of Dan Baum to read his essay accounting his experience working at the New Yorker, posted in increments within the 140-character limit?
I know some classics are being posted on Twitter this way, though I don’t have any examples to give you. I would like to see, though, a Twitter version of Dracula, as the novel follows the style of journal and diary writing and so would seem perfect. Who wouldn’t want to follow Mina Harker?
[Literature] Here is a book club-esque “challenge”: read David Foster Wallace’s thousand-page book, Infinite Jest over this summer. The program is called Infinite Summer, and if you don’t have any friends you may share the burden with, they have a Facebook group and Twitter feed to help support your monstrous task.
[via Mark Athitakis]
[Glossy Pages] An interesting article about Edward Steichen’s fashion photography:
In 1900, a critic reviewing some of his portraits wrote admiringly that Steichen “is not satisfied showing us how a person looks, but how he thinks a person should look.”
It is definitely one of those articles that are worth checking out for just the photo gallery itself.
[Literature] The Guardian Books Blog bemoans the upcoming Catcher in the Rye sequel, 60 Years Later: Coming Through the Rye by John David California. The book, in which Holden is in his seventies, reminds me of a McSweeney’s piece, “The Catcher in the Retirement Home.”
[Art] I didn’t want to neglect mentioning that a new comic strip by Chris Ware has been included in a recent New Yorker issue. It is in the same format as his “Building Stories,” chapters of which have also been seen in past New Yorker and New York Times issues, among others. Should this be a continuation, the protagonist is at a much later stage in her life (now mentioning being a married mother) though no less troubled than we knew her to be before.
[Grammar Police] On exclamation points, Stuart Jeffries wonders: “what is it about the age of email that gets people so over-excited?”
Shipley and Schwalbe argue that in the internet age, a dash of sensation is just what is needed. “Email is without affect,” they write. “It has a dulling quality that almost necessitates kicking everything up a notch just to bring it to where it would normally be.”
Which is my prime motivation in using an exclamation mark these days. This all sheds insight on another phenomena of internet-age correspondences: the emoticon. In a medium where you may not show your face or tone of voice, users have found new ways to present tone in their conversations.
Jeffries says more:
Why should email in particular be without affect? Weren’t earlier forms of written correspondence - telegrams, say, or letters - equally so? There must be something else going on. Arguably, users of each form develop styles to suit the medium.
It is important to note that people online communicate just as they would in person: direct, to-the-point. Hand-written letters of the old days were spoken in flourish and style, and could perhaps paint images or tell intimate thoughts to the recipient.
But today’s Twitter generation of writing reflects more the telegram-style of writing Jeffries mentions, and cannot rely on the verbosity of language to get a mood or tone across with their writing. Any Twitter user will tell you: Why write something that uses 20 characters when it could be done with one?
