When Bad Covers Happen to Good Books

Ever thought a book was too ugly to read? Joe Queenan found that he couldn’t get through The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, a book he knew to be a masterpiece, and one he had read before. What was the problem? The packaging.

Every time I picked up the book, my eyes were lured back to those fulsome photos of Sugarplum Huck. I do not know what Huck looked like as Twain imagined him, any more than I know how F. Scott Fitzgerald envisioned Jay Gatsby. But Gatsby cannot look like Robert Redford, and the most memorable character in American fiction cannot look like the diabolically cuddly Elijah Wood. Cannot, cannot, cannot.

I’ve had my share of books like that over the years. I’ve always felt a little silly about it, but at least I’m not alone.

It works the other way, too: I recently bought an edition of Bronte’s Wuthering Heights just because I liked the cover so much. In my defense, it is a classic and no different than taking a chance on any other book you haven’t read. And, as it turns out, it comes from a collection of deluxe classics from Penguin which includes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

12.08.2009Tagged with:    

IKEA Catalogue iPhone App

Beginning with the UK market, Ikea is releasing their catalogue as an iPhone application.

12.07.2009Tagged with:    

David Foster Wallace: All That

Speaking of Wallace, The New Yorker has published a short story of his entitled All That.

12.07.2009Tagged with:    

An Indie Rock Alphabet Book

Birthdays, puppy dogs, breakfast in bed…
Nothing could be better than Radiohead

Rhyming book of ABCs from Paste Magazine with great illustrations.

(via coudal)

12.06.2009Tagged with:    

Grammar Challenge!

Class worksheet on grammar and usage from David Foster Wallace, given to students of a nonfiction workshop he taught. The discussion in the comments is worth your time, too.

I liked this bit from the Answers and Explanations page on how Wallace taught the placement of modifiers.

You have been entrusted to feed for your neighbor’s dog for a week while he (the neighbor) is out of town. The neighbor returns home; something has gone awry; you are questioned.

“I fed the dog.”

“Did you feed the parakeet?”

“I fed only the dog.”

“Did anyone else feed the dog?”

“Only I fed the dog.”

“Did you fondle/molest the dog?”

“I only fed the dog!”

(via kottke)

12.05.2009Tagged with:    

Bad Sex Award

The Literary Review has awarded the 2009 bad sex in fiction award to Jonathan Littell’s The Kindly Ones.

The Kindly Ones, which tells the story of the Holocaust through the eyes of one of the executioners, beat off stiff competition from a stellar shortlist that included entries from Philip Roth, John Banville, Paul Theroux and the literary rock star Nick Cave.

Har har.

The judges paid tribute to the novel’s breadth and ambition, calling it “in part, a work of genius”.

“However,” the citation continued, “a mythologically inspired passage and lines such as ‘I came suddenly, a jolt that emptied my head like a spoon scraping the inside of a soft-boiled egg’ clinched the award for The Kindly Ones. We hope he takes it in good humour.”

There’s more from the winner, as well as passages from the other nominees, on the prize shortlist.

12.04.2009Tagged with:    

Chairman Mao’s Underground City

Take a photo tour of the network of tunnels under the city of Beijing, ordered built by Mao in 1969, designed to accommodate all of the city’s inhabitants in the event of a nuclear attack.

No one really knows how much of the subterranean nuclear metropolis was actually completed, or just how far the network of underground tunnels and caverns was due to be extended, though it’s generally believed they connected up with all of Beijing’s main hubs and governmental locations, including Tiananmen Square, Beijing’s Central Station and the Western Hills.

12.04.2009Tagged with:    

WTF? – New OK Go Video

Fun video for the first single off OK Go’s new album, Of the Blue Colour of the Sky.

There is also a ‘making of‘ video with commentary from the band.

(via kottke)

12.02.2009Tagged with:    

Scientists grow pork meat in a laboratory

Scientists have taken cells from a living pig and used them to grow muscle tissue in a solution of nutrients. The tissue is described as “soggy” and needing “exercise” to give it a better texture, but the hope is to one day provide meat for human consumption that has less of an impact on the environment and doesn’t involve animal suffering.

The advent of so-called “in-vitro” or cultured meat could reduce the billions of tons of greenhouse gases emitted each year by farm animals — if people are willing to eat it.

So far the scientists have not tasted it, but they believe the breakthrough could lead to sausages and other processed products being made from laboratory meat in as little as five years’ time.

(via 3 quarks daily)

12.01.2009Tagged with:    

Worst Decade Ever

Time has a countdown of the 10 worst things about the first decade of the 21st century. Could it be the worst decade ever?

Indeed, it is very likely that the first 10 years of this century will go down as the most dispiriting and disillusioning decade Americans have lived through in the post World War II era.

Indeed.

(via airbag)

12.01.2009Tagged with:    

The Americans

The Americans, by Robert Frank

Robert Frank’s masterpiece, The Americans, was first published fifty years ago in the US. The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York is observing the anniversary with an exhibition of all the images from the book, plus other photos, contact sheets and a short film by Frank.

The Americans contains 83 photographs made on road trips across the country.

Looking at America, Frank took in things others had seen but failed to note. Some were banal: jukeboxes, the ubiquity of flags, the many manifestations of automotive culture. Other elements – vaguer, abstract, even sinister – were anything but banal: a sense of isolation, the place of African-Americans in US society, a tension between openness and confinement. The latter is evident in everything from the sweep of a Southwestern landscape to the flickering image on a TV screen.

It’s a beautiful book, and many of its themes will still resonate with viewers 50 years later. The exhibit will be up at the Met through January third. I’ll be making a trip to NYC at the beginning of the year and I’m looking forward to seeing them all in person.

11.30.2009Tagged with:    

5 Star Wars Status Updates

What if Facebook had existed a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away? Here are some status updates from classic Star Wars characters.

11.28.2009Tagged with:    

Califone: All My Friends Are Funeral Singers

I’m really enjoying the new Califone record, All My Friends Are Funeral Singers. I’ve been a fan for a long time, and it’s great to see them putting together quality releases again and again.

I loved this bit from the Pitchfork review:

“Giving Away the Bride” is one of the most radical deconstructions of normal rock production in the band’s catalog, eschewing even their normal roughly recorded acoustic guitars for a spaced-out beat and a monster of a distorted electronic bass figure, over which Rutili floats dreamily, intoning like a blues singer from the 1930s who got lost and tripped into the 21st century. The otherworldliness is so well-developed that it’s genuinely startling when the piano drops almost four minutes in or the live drums take up the rhythm a minute after that. If the band had hits, this would be among the greatest.

As Harry at Owl and Bear notes, no Califone release has received a score below 8 at Pitchfork. That has to be some kind of record.

11.28.2009Tagged with:    

Intimate Ella Fitzgerald, Rediscovered

Twelve Nights in Hollywood is a new box set of Ella Fitzgerald performing over a twelve day period in a small jazz club in Los Angeles. Remarkably, none of the tracks have been released before, despite a scarcity of live recordings in small venues, and despite the quality of the performances.

Gary Giddins, the veteran critic and author of “Jazz,” agrees. “This ranks on the top shelf of her live recordings,” he said. “It’s about as good as it gets.”

Why these tapes stayed locked in the vault for nearly half a century — and what it took to set them free — is a tale of a producer’s neglect, a jazz sleuth’s obsession and a string of happy coincidences.

11.28.2009Tagged with:    

The Conflicted Existence of a Female Porn Writer

McSweeney’s is running a column, credited to Lynsey G., that details her involvement as a writer in the smut industry.

From the introduction:

In many ways I believe that stance to be a fair one, and I stand by my decision to support women’s choices. But the longer I keep my tenuous toehold in the jizz rag biz, the more the realities of the porn industry stare me in the face, and it’s not just the faces covered in jizz that bother me. There are a lot of really upsetting things going on both inside and outside the studio, both on the industry and consumer sides, which are disturbing and decidedly unfriendly to women. The language used to describe them in industry terminology and in social contexts, the attitudes about their worth as human beings, the aesthetics with which they are presented to the world, and the acts they perform raise a lot of questions. I mean, what’s with the fake boobs and nails and eyelashes and tans and hair? Why the no-body-hair rule? And who came up with the idea that ejaculate is the new trend in facial moisturizers? On that note, where is the line between pleasure and degradation drawn, and by whom? Why have the past few years seen such an abrupt switch from full-length feature films to half-hour-long frenzies of manic semen spewing?

11.27.2009Tagged with:    

Empty LA

Photographer Matt Logue spent 4 years making beautiful photos of an uninhabited Los Angeles.

Empty LA from Matt Logue

His book can be purchased here.

11.25.2009Tagged with:    

Lincoln’s Letter to Young George Patten

In 1861, less than a month before the start of the American Civil War, Abraham Lincoln took a moment to write a letter confirming that he had indeed met a young George Patten the year before in Springfield, Illinois. George’s classmates hadn’t believed his story about meeting the President of the United States and had mocked him, prompting his teacher to write to the White House to settle the matter.

Lincoln’s reply reads: “Whom it may concern, I did see and talk with master George Evans Patten, last May, at Springfield, Illinois. Respectfully, A Lincoln”

Abraham Lincoln's Letter to George Patten, confirming their meeting

The letter was sold to a private collector for $60,000.

11.25.2009Tagged with:    

Have a Cigarette with The Flintstones

The first two seasons of The Flinstones were co-sponsored by Winston cigarettes, as the series was originally intended for adults. Witness Fred and Barney enjoying a smoke while the womenfolk work about the yard.

11.24.2009Tagged with:    

Scroll Clock

Working clock with numbers made from scroll bars, built using MooTools.

11.23.2009Tagged with:    

Going West

Beautiful animated film from the NZ Book Council to promote reading and the love of books.

(via boing boing)

11.23.2009Tagged with:    
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