Posy Simmonds originally wrote Gemma Bovery as a 100+ episode serial in The Guardian. The story is told with a cool mix of comics panels, splash illustrations, big chunks of text. It all mixes in together.
The narrator is a baker living in Normandy, who becomes obsessed with Gemma’s adultery as it happens and as it’s […]
Opolis is a comic made from photographs of paper cut-outs in a 3-dimensional office building. I’d have a hard time thinking of something more exhausting. Cool results, though. [via waxy]
Eric Wilson’s book Against Happiness: In Praise of Melancholy “challenges the recent happiness trend and celebrates the meditative virtues of melancholy.” He’s most successful when talking about the meditative virtues. The argument is simple: acknowledging the tragic, the struggle, the rain, and the inevitable decline of all things makes joy, success, the sun, and livelihood […]
Based on some keyword research I did this afternoon. “ThunderCats, ho!” is a natural winner in Google search results. The long tail of enthusiasm extends to over 35 o’s, after which point I gave up.
The most interesting part is that HUGE drop in hits for the 3-o version. Among its neighboring easy-to-type competitors, “ThunderCats, hooo!” […]
How We’re Wrecking Our Feet. It’s the shoes. Old news, but worth hearing again and again.
Foot freedom is a movement in the ultralight hiking community as well. Once you realize that you don’t need to carry 50lbs for a weekend trip, you realize that you can ditch the leather boots and hike with shoes. And […]
The Most Wanted Song and the Most Unwanted Song were written in response to survey results, just like the earlier creation of the world’s Most Wanted Paintings. The Most Unwanted Song features an operatic, rapping soprano and children singing a holiday polka:
The most unwanted music is over 25 minutes long, veers wildly between loud and […]
A collection of 100 great opening lines. I wonder, for comics, what a collection of great opening panels would look like…? [via sbh]
The Well-Dressed Man With A Beard.
After the final no there comes a yes
And on that yes the future world depends.
No was the night. Yes is this present sun.
If the rejected things, the things denied,
Slid over the western cataract, yet one,
One only, one thing that was firm, even
No greater than a cricket’s horn, no more
Than a […]
I found The Best American Science & Nature Writing 2007 when I was out hiking a couple few weeks ago. An Appalachian Trail hiker left it behind, recommending to whoever came by. I snagged it.
Any anthology will have some hits and misses. At least, in contrast with my frustrating experience with Flash Fiction Forward, all […]
John Mark Harris arranged a piece for piano by Iannis Xenakis to make it, y’know, playable by a human. You can see and hear the graph for Evryali.
Harris comments:
The title refers to the “Medusa, with head of writing snakes”, as well as “the open sea”. Both allusions have clear meanings upon hearing the piece…
Evryali was […]
A video of Bob Becker playing some novelty xylophone tunes with a college group. I saw Becker playing with Nexus a few years back. He’s insanely skilled.
An interview with Mythbusters:
We’re just trying to see what happens. And we have relatively little time and a whole lot of curiosity, so the most efficient way to get there is what we do, and that often happens to be some form of science… That being said, the fact that we don’t have formal training, […]
“As unseemly as it is for America’s wealthiest people to strive for more money, America’s political class is far worse. They have a ridiculous excess of power, and yet they only want more.”
Eddie Murphy riffs on wanting McDonald’s food when you were a kid. “I had one of those mothers, no matter what you want, she has the ingredients at home.” It’s Eddie Murphy so, nsfw.
The title of Pierre Bayard’s book How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read is a bit misleading. Don’t get your hopes up for any on-the-ground tactics for escaping awkward conversation. Bayard spends a couple hundred pages, illustrated mostly with stories and examples from his specialty in French literature, talking about why you shouldn’t feel […]
Shakespeare in the Bush. “An American anthropologist set out to study the Tiv of West Africa and was taught the true meaning of Hamlet.”:
I decided to skip the soliloquy. Even if Claudius was here thought quite right to marry his brother’s widow, there remained the poison motif, and I knew they would disapprove of fratricide. […]
The New York Times writes about the upcoming collaboration between Big Boi and the Atlanta Ballet. [via around midtown]
Stefanie Posavec made a diagram of every sentence in On the Road organized by words per sentence. Here are more literary diagrams.
Pecha Kucha Night is an informal gathering of presenters who are limited to 20 slides of 20 seconds each. So, theoretically, it’s a forum with less rambling and more variety in the course of an evening. Lots of cities are having them now. Could be cool. The next Atlanta Pecha Kucha will be next Sunday […]
Eyeglasses and the pushing up thereof, an analysis of optical adjustment techniques. Good commentary from the audience.
This interview with Philip Gourevitch is mostly about interviewing, but I like this, too:
My guilty pleasure reads are things that are just fabulously written. I don’t know how to say it without it being pretentious—I’ll read a chapter from Moby Dick or Adventures of Huckleberry Finn at random, where the language is just rocketing around, […]
This fictional Paris Review Interview with “Constance Eakins” is a clever bit of promotion for The Mayor’s Tongue. Here’s a pdf of the interview [1.5mb]. Eakins started with comics:
Interviewer: Was it when you ran away from home that you began to feel that you were going to be a writer?
Eakins: No, I always wanted to […]
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