A picture of the Jefferson Bible. This is the kind of awesome thing that people did before electricity/tv/internet (Jefferson Bible on Wikipedia). The last chapter in the Jefferson version has such a great ending.
If you fight terror with terror, how do you tell which is which?
By choice, I stayed ignorant of the scandals at Abu Ghraib when the news first broke. Too disgusted. Too disheartened. I didn’t want to see it or hear about it, though it seemed the photos were everywhere. I finally came around.
Philip Gourevitch wrote […]
And I quote, HARPERCOLLINS TO PUBLISH COLLECTION OF NEWSPAPER BLACKOUT POEMS!, end quote.
Dan Roam has shared the “Napkin Tools” from his book. (I wrote a wee review of The Back of the Napkin a while ago). New offerings in PDF format include the Visual Thinking Codex, the SQVID, and the Rule.
I stumbled on a couple music reading lists on Amazon. Daniel Levitin suggests 11 books to read on music. Songwriters on Songwriting could be good and I’m especially curious about The Art of Practicing.
And Alex Ross wrote a top twenty guide for 20th-century music, both books and recordings. I’m curious about John Cage’s Silence and […]
By now you’ve probably heard Michael Pollan’s seven words of advice from In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto: “Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.” In the book he spends 150 pages talking about nutritionism, reductionist food science, and the negative health effects of the Western diet. In the last 50 pages he finally […]
I wanted this to be better. It starts off well, introduced by Nick Hornby. With a few exceptions, most of the other 40-something essays in the book didn’t do much for me.
Rodney Rothman’s piece—”I Still Like Jessica”—is probably my favorite. It’s a transcript of an interview with an old sweetheart (hear the interview and see […]
Llewelyn, I dont even want the money. I just want us to be back like we was.
We will be.
No we wont. I’ve thought about it. It’s a false god.
Yeah. But it’s real money.
I don’t have much to say about No Country for Old Men other than that it’s every bit as good as the excellent […]
“If reason ruled the world, would history even exist?”
On his first trip outside of Poland, an editor gave Ryszard Kapuściński a copy of Herodotus‘ The Histories (which I’ve never read or read much about, besides this recent New Yorker article). The book became his off-and-on companion for the rest of his career in journalism. Kapuściński […]
Ira Glass curated this collection of nonfiction. The New Kings of Nonfiction is a selection of favorites that he’s had filed away for a while, articles that he keeps passing along to others. The focus is on good storytelling found in original reporting:
I wish there were a catchy name for stories like this. For one […]
Dan Roam does a pretty good job with this one: The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures. One of Roam’s main arguments (sometimes belabored) is that we were all comfortable drawing when we were in kindergarten. Somehow we got frigid. We play visually dumb. We don’t need to.
Visual thinking is […]
In 1800s America, Shakespeare productions had juggling and singing amidst the acts, and theatergoers would cheer the heroes, boo the villains, shout out lines along with the actors, even walk about on the stage. Opera divas would sing “Yankee Doodle,” “Home Sweet Home,” Irish ballads and other folk songs, and take requests from the audience. […]
Michael Pollan talked with Google last month about his latest book, In Defense of Food. He’s funnier than I expected. My doodles:
This interview with Bill Bishop, about the increasing social segmentation in America, has some cool tie-ins with a book I’ve been loving lately, Lawrence Levine’s Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Levine touches on the changing use of public space in the early 1900s as “Culture” was increasingly associated with the wealthy, and […]
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 […]
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 […]
A collection of 100 great opening lines. I wonder, for comics, what a collection of great opening panels would look like…? [via sbh]
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 […]
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. […]
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 […]
Frans Masereel’s book first appeared in 1964 under the title “Route des Hommes.” The 60 woodcuts in this book came forty years after the others I reviewed. From what I can piece together from the French and German sources that I can’t read, I think maybe it was connected with of some kind of exhibition […]
The Thurber & White send-up on the knee phenomenon:
Simply stated, the knee phenomenon is this: occasions arise sometimes when a girl presses her knee, ever so gently, against the knee of the young man she is out with… Often the topic of conversation has something to do with it: the young people, talking along pleasantly, […]
Cadillac Desert was pretty awesome. Marc Reisner tells a story (in sometimes overwhelming detail) of the American West, and how we have explored, settled, and altered it. And how it was maybe a little idiotic to do it the way we have.
The Mormons were the first to understand and refine large-scale irrigation projects. Later we […]
The seven deadly words of book reviewing. There are over 200 comments now that add to the list, most of them very good.
Probably a parallel here with the birth of Athena:
[update: photo of a really awesome woodcut removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst]
From L’Idee by Frans Masereel.
An interview with Dan Roam, author of The Back of the Napkin: Solving Problems and Selling Ideas with Pictures, which I need to remember to buy:
Today there are great drawing tools in a lot of software packages, and many business people, bless their hearts, are getting better at using them. The problem is the pictures […]
Another set of woodcuts from Frans Masereel (last Friday I took a look at Die Sonne). Die Stadt was first published in 1925. The impressions of war-torn Europe cover the range of everyday life: the birth of a child, a man with a prostitute, parents with their children, medical students at the morgue, street scenes […]
A man chases the sun through city, sky, and sea in this wordless story by Frans Masereel. Here’s my favorite sequence from Die Sonne:
[update: images removed due to copyright complaint from Verwertungsgesellschaft Bild-Kunst. no more free publicity—you’ll have to trust me that it’s worth your time]
Take a look at some other woodcuts from Die Sonne. […]
In a New York Times article about the death of encyclopedias, a Britannica guy talks about well-designed books as a luxury item. Content might be everywhere, but good design can still expect an appreciative audience:
He envisioned the print volumes living on as a niche, luxury item, with high-quality paper and glossy photographs—similar to the way […]
It’s almost always the anecdotes that bore me in business books. The Definite Drucker is a sort biography of the ideas of Peter Drucker, the late consultant and management guru. I like a lot of the theory and philosophy, but when we get to the struggles of Motorola’s supply chain or decreasing overhead at Colgate-Palmolive, […]
A recording of Tony Danza reading “The Barber’s Unhappiness,” a funny story from George Saunders‘ collection in Pastoralia. The book was quite good, but hearing a story like this makes it even better. [thanks, austin]
Scott Rosenberg is giving away paperback editions of his book, Dreaming in Code. I liked it—no reason not to snag a copy.
I rediscovered Chuck Klosterman this week. Even when I don’t buy a word he writes, it’s usually just plain fun to read. From a good review of his book I’m reading now, Chuck Klosterman IV:
Younger generations of Americans urgently need to learn to refuse their culture at face value, lest the stories sold by media […]
If you’ve ever worked in a library (I’ve put in a couple years), or if you just like libraries and spend inordinate amounts of time there (I’ve put in a couple dozen years), Don Borchert’s book may give you a bit of déjà vu. Somehow he got the same customers I got, even though he […]
Each chapter of Faint Praise features a measured, workmanlike argument about topics like book selection, or matching reviewers and books, or the ethical minefields of the industry. Surprisingly thoughtful but not exciting. Gail Pool doesn’t work up much outrage or seem very enthusiastic about the status of the book reviewing trade. She doesn’t spend a […]
When characters in books get hit, they tend to get hit in the solar plexus. [via vqr]
Each chapter of The Party of the First Part: The Curious World of Legalese takes on a broad topic, like criminal law, tort, money, or sex. Author Adam Freedman brings up the main vocabulary (habeas corpus, misdemeanor, legal tender) and some of the more obscure ideas (per stirpes, res ipsa loquitur), exploring their roots along […]
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