What's All This Then?
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What's All This Then?
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Friday Edition
State Dinosaur of Texas: Paluxysaurus jonesi
The Field Notes County Fair edition. Our tribute to the 50 states.
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fresh signals categorical archives
Writing and Reading
From The Complete Works of Shakespeare.
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"When you get 200 designs with strawberries, we'd do a strawberry shoe. So that's how we would do it and having our own factory, I could have a new shoe out tomorrow." A great interview with Steve Van Doren: "The History of Vans."
Slushpile Hell held a Twitter contest for the top 25 worst children's books ever.
An excerpt from The Thousand, KG's new thriller, to be published August 24th. It's an amazing ride, beautifully written, ingeniously constructed and a ton of fun.
Today's long read, What should medicine do when it can't save your life. Worth reading.
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To go along with the trailer we made for You Lost Me There, Here's a quick interview with Rosecrans.
Laura Jayne Martin is tired of sharing an apartment with William Carlos Williams. Claire Zulkey, on the other hand, seems quite satisfied with the arrangement as it is. (From our Verse By Voice series.)
"The key for any soothsayer/fortune teller is to, above all, keep it vague." The Bilbioracle returns to The Morning News this afternoon. For a bit of background, see Laura Miller's piece in Salon.
"Picasso said that a great work of art comes together 'just barely.'" Literary Endings: Pretty Bows, Blunt Axes, and Modular Furniture by Sonya Chung at The Millions.
Zulkey interviews April Winchell, successful voice actor, winner of every major advertising award, and the creator of Regretsy.
"...but when my day-camp counselor asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, I did not tell her that I hoped one day to correct who-whom mix-ups or determine whether 'faucetry' was a real, dictionary-approved word. I told her I wanted to be a princess." Lori Fradkin, Copy Editor.
"...the new national pastime: Baseball, hot dogs, apple pie and making determinations and judgments without a full set of facts." Tweetage Wasteland.
I'm not quite sure, but I think the point being made here is that "Login" is not a verb.
Simon Armstrong buys book for Tate Britain and Tate Modern shops in London, here are some books he loved from last year.
"Picking a font from a drop-down tool bar is not 'typography'.".
"We found out that my hooker with a heart of gold had spent some time the previous night doing what many of us do while waiting for a john to return from a smoke break: editing photos on facebook." Sledgehammer and Whore, a great story by a screenwriter named Josh. It's the best thing I've read online all summer. Via Waxy.
KG is getting close to 1,000 Twitter followers ahead of the release of his new novel The Thousand. Once he's there he'll choose ten followers at random to win signed advance reader copies, with one also receiving a signed and hand-written and deleted chapter in a Field Notes Brand Memo Book. Ten others will receive a big Field Notes gift pack.
"So I've resolved to reread the man. I've taken my favorite Vonnegut novel, God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater, down from the shelf. To my surprise, having it so near has made me anxious, as if an ex-girlfriend has returned." -Jacob Lambert for The Millions.
How long can food be out of the fridge before it kills me?
"Dear husband, that first weekend we spent together, I saw you when you thought I wasn't looking. You were sitting on the futon in my tiny efficiency apartment over the shoe store and didn't realize I could see you in the hallway mirror. You had leaned your head against the wall, closed your eyes and had a look on your face like you were both in pain and in bliss all at the same time. That's how I knew you were in love with me." Dead Advice. Via Gapers Block.
"Which means that more and more journalists are getting exposed to thinking in grids and bulk-editing and so forth. Or at least getting interns to do it for them. Which is interesting. Also, getting fired or taking a buyout helps people gain perspective on what they like doing; there's that." Real Editors Ship, by Paul Ford. Brilliant.
The Slow and Painful Collapse of a Relationship Over the Course of a Weeklong Vacation as Expressed by the Names Each Partner Gave Their Digital Photos Taken During Said Vacation. By Matt Hulten.
Faulkner at Virginia, background on his lectures, which have now been digitized and are available for listening. Awesome.
KG's The Outfit gets a nice write up in today's New York Times
On this day in 1951 The Catcher in the Rye was published. In 1957, JDS declared the Holden role unactable.
Little. Photographs documenting quiet moments in small settings. Via The Post Family.
The Lizard, the Catacombs, and the Clock, by Sean Michaels. What's beneath Paris and the society that's uncovering it. Things Magazine has more including links to catacomb maps, and photos.
"Your subjective experience is not observable, and you overestimate how much you telegraph your inner thoughts and emotions." The illusion of transparency.
"Why oh why oh Won't you stay in Ohio? Please don't do this to the Cavs. We'll be have-nots instead of haves." Fragments from Ben Greenman's LeBron! The Musical.
Heartbreaking but lovely letter written to actor Patrick Stewart regarding his work on Star Trek: The Next Generation.
"I don't think we capture the right moments. The camera flashes and we pose. We pose. We create moments as artificial as the memory we want of them." Pictures, by Jack Shedd.
"Lambie had a little girl, her hair was white as snow..."
The trailer for Gary Shteyngart's new book cuts a bit close to our own Copy Goes Here, but his has funny cameos by Jay McInerney and Jeffrey Eugenides, so we'll allow it.
"#15: Everyone shall have the right to spend overnight in the Studio working." Related to the last, and one reason we love Art.Lebedev. The Constitution.
"Now, don't get me wrong: I still love nude, dancing girls and the promotion of nude, dancing girls to lonely men. That's why all of my strippers will remain employed by Squeezle." To the Loyal Patrons of 4 Play Diamond Lounge, by Lucas Kavner.
Fascinating, The Writer Who Couldn't Read.
A particularly catastrophic summer reading list from The Millions. To that I'd add Earth Abides by George Stewart. For non-apocalyptic (mostly) summer reading, check our Field-Tested Books Book.
Chicagoan Tim Souers documents the bad, the worse and the delightfully irrelevant on his illustrated Cubs blog.
Congrats to KG for his new forthcoming book The Thousand being picked for The Millions Most Anticipated Summer reading list.
Humor writer Polly Frost shares her fave 10 funny novels of the 20th century. Any list that contains Post Office, Lucky Jim and Rosemary's Baby is okay by me.
"Wait - Lex Luther is your Facebook Friend?" The Man of Tomorrow gets email.
A modern, compulsively-readable epistolary novel, like Clarissa, only in emails. And funny.
An eloquent argument for engaged reading that won't take at all long to read.
"For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity's affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss--a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity's mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world's thirstiest gerbil." Congrats to Molly, winner of the this year's Bulwer-Lytton contest for bad fiction.
"Many of the occupants were noticeably perspiring due to lack of ventilation or air conditioner, and had subsequently removed most of the their clothing." Building code violations for the Love Shack, by Curtis Retherford.
UPS was founded by two teenagers with one bicycle and $100, borrowed from a friend.
"Even Zynga's designers seem well aware that their game is repetitive and shallow." A. J. Patrick Liszkiewicz's great read "Cultivated Play: Farmville" on why so many people play the game. And for further reading: PumpkinZonia. Via DF.
"Her friends agree to introduce me to her on one condition: that I make no mention of 'The Book', as people here refer to it." A rare meeting with the reclusive Harper Lee.
Steve Martin has leaked Steve Martin's tour rider.
"As we walked to the car Chris asked, 'Do you think he was embarrassed by us?' 'Oh, definitely,' I said, laughing. 'And he's not using sunscreen.'" The Other Fellow First, by my Sis.
In support of his new book, What He's Poised To Do, Ben Greenman and I ran an experiment dubbed The Reverse Textual Rorschach, wherein, while traveling through Norway, I tried to guess what the stories in his book are about based on snippets he provided.
Karim Rashid on information aesthetics in industrial design.
"Résumé, Woodyard's latest, is an exasperating piece of literary claptrap worth less than the single sheet of paper it was printed on and the five to eight seconds it took me to scan it." A Literary Critic Reviews My Résumé, by Kent Woodyard.
"The older I get, the better I was." Nice
piece by Earl Pomerantz.
"I know. Comparing a fifteenth-century book to a defunct home video technology from the era of leotards and big hair is a bit underwhelming." The Betamax of Printing, Laura Massey's Dispatches from a Rare Book Shop.
"What were we thinking about when we had all that extra time?" Say Hello to My Little Friend from Dave Pell. Brilliant.
Required reading for the week: Errol Morris' five part series about unknown unknowns: "The Anosognosic's Dilemma: Something's Wrong But You'll Never Know What It Is." Part two is here.
"The only difference between me and perhaps you is that my imagination earns me money." Ian Fleming's 1962 essay for the Guardian, "How to Write a Thriller."
"My new publisher, at Publishing House W, is Editor G, who left Publishing House Y for the job." Susan Orlean's first book made the rounds.
Oh mighty Biblioracle, what shall I read next?
100 staircases, 35 miles, two days, and too many new friends to count. Alissa went on a walk.
Local note for NYC. Ben Greenman is reading from What He's Poised To Do tonight at the Greenlight Bookstore.
Ulysses for Dummies.
Dear Bloom...
Joyce's wife Nora once asked, "I guess the man's a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn't he?" She ought to know. NSTBRAW (Not safe to be read aloud at work.)
The First Editions.
DT Max's great story in the New Yorker about Joyce's grandson: "The Injustice Collector."
"Opening bookshop in Paris. Please send money." Jessa Crispin on Joyce, Margaret Anderson and Sylvia Beach
Ulysses, selectively annotated with images. Fab.
Geoff wonders what would happen if you fed all of Ulysses into a 3D printer?
"In 1924, 1 went to the office of His Master's Voice in Paris to ask them if they would record a reading by James Joyce from Ulysses." -Sylvia Beach.
"Mr. Joyce manages to give the effect of unedited human minds, drifting aimlessly along from one triviality to another, confused and diverted by memory, by sensation and by inhibition, is, in short, perhaps the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness." Edmund Wilson's July 5, 1922 review of Ulysses for TNR. "Mr. Joyce has told the whole truth."
"Silence, exile and cunning." Djuna Barne's interview with Joyce, Vanity Fair, March 1922. (pdf)
"I am kinda self-conscious about my heart, and its contents." Dispatch 14 from a guy trying unsuccessfully to sell a song In Nashville.
The Great Salami Caper -Z.
Great Literature Retitled To Boost Website Traffic, by Mike Lacher.
How to write a Malcolm Gladwell Bestseller (also known as the 'MGB').
Too cute, icon letter and envelope. Via WhattheCool
The psychology of Darth Vader revealed.
So you know. To indent or not to indent.
"Dear Goneril, I always thought you had the ugliest name. Oh, and the ugliest character. You told your father that you loved him more than words can say. Leo Sayer said that same thing, but he didn't go on to betray his father and poison his sister, at least as far as I know." Letters With Character, "letters written to fictional characters by actual people." Inspired by Ben Greenman's new collection of short stories What He's Poised To Do.
"She will not show herself, the long-dead chambermaid. For hours I have waited in Room 217, sulking and dozing upon this hotel coverlet, my clothes flung around like a teenager's, a sock here and a sock there."
The Truth: You prefer the things you own because you rationalize your past choices to protect your sense of self." Fanboyism and Brand Loyalty.
Two years before his death, footage of William Burroughs shooting William Shakespeare, which, strangely, is exactly what it sounds like.
"Two popular types of bad copyediting are (1) editing that didn't need doing in the first place, and (2) needed editing that didn't get done. Both types can be accomplished with or without the aid of a computer, but there are reasons why a copyeditor deploying a word processor is likely to end up committing both."
The world's coolest looking bookstores. Via @lisadimona.
"Which are the most inspirational five books about film ever written?" Sight & Sound asked 51 leading critics and writers.
"On this day in 1964, T. S. Eliot wrote to Groucho Marx to confirm that he was sending a car to pick 'you and Mrs. Groucho' up for dinner."
"Avis will never know as much about advertising as DDB, and DDB will never know as much about the rent a car business as Avis." A list of advertising philosophies assembled by the rental car company. How much was put into real world practice is anyone's guess.
I can tell millions of dollars wouldn't make you happy anyway: a brief follow-up with regard to my losing your money, by Dan Kennedy.
Related to the last, sort of. Laura Ingalls Wilder on Twitter.
"We know screwups are an essential part of making something good. That's why our goal is to screw up as fast as possible." Wired takes a look at How Pixar built Toy Story 3.
Today's long read, The Pleasures of Imagination.
Design your own Wallpaper cover.
The Shop I Want -Rands.
"If your chosen book fails to please you, the Biblioracle will refund you the cost of your free recommendation." John Warner knows all. Greetings From the Biblioracle at The Morning News. Live today, you tell John which five books you've most recently read and he will tell you what to read next. Here's how this all got started.
All right! Rosecrans Baldwin's debut novel You Lost Me There is featured in Time Mag's summer preview.
Did you ever have one of those days where you have a bunch of stuff to do and you have no problem starting anything but then after a little while, either because you're unhappy with the progress you have made or because you suddenly find it difficult to focus on the work at hand, you become distracted and then you have to start all over, but now that project doesn't seems so attractive anymore so you rummage around and pick up another bit of work only to find that your enthusiasm, which at first seemed boundless, has disappeared right in the middle of
"Exactly a century after rumours of his death turned out to be entirely accurate, one of Mark Twain's dying wishes is at last coming true: an extensive, outspoken and revelatory autobiography which he devoted the last decade of his life to writing is finally going to be published."
Great long read, The Afterlife of Stieg Larsson.
Zulkey interviews former Gawker editor and current memoirist Emily Gould.
So you know, the worst beverage in America: Cold Stone PB&C (Gotta Have It size, 24 fl oz) - 2,010 calories, 131 g fat (68 g saturated), 153 g sugars. Sugar Equivalent: 30 Chewy Chips Ahoy Cookies (yum).
The New York Review of Magazines is an annual published by students at Columbia University's Graduate School of Journalism. Ambitious and definitely worth checking out.
As Lapham's describes this graphic, "everyone who was anyone knew everybody who was anybody."
Look at Me! Long CJR piece by Maureen Tkacik on writing for various places, including the Journal and Jezebel, and how things have worked out. Or maybe haven't.
"The speed record for the nearly two thousand mile Pony Express route was set at seven days, 17 hours with the delivery of Lincoln's inaugural address. Can you imagine if the recipients of that letter opened the dust-covered envelope to find a message that only included one line: Abraham just checked-in at the U.S. Capitol." Tweetage Wasteland.
A smart new book club idea from The Rumpus.
Lesson learned: don't put your Social Security number on a billboard if your identity theft protection service can't really protect you. Great read from the Phoenix New Times about LifeLock and their ubiquitous ads.
"And no more of that talk about 'the tragedy of fame.' The tragedy of fame is when no one shows up and you're singing to the cleaning lady in some empty joint that hasn't seen a paying customer since Saint Swithin's day." Frank Sinatra writing to George Michael in 1990.
"It has been a tradition in the village since 1633, when their ancestors made a promise to God that they would perform the play if the village was spared from the bubonic plague. They were indeed spared, and as a result they are still performing the play to this day."
"Whoa, you scared the bejesus out of me. I guess I didn't hear you come in. How long have you been standing there? Anyway, welcome to Taco Bell. What can I get you?" Kevin Nguyen's imaginary conversations with American Apparel models.
It took the Secret Service ten years to find a counterfeiter so inept he spelled "Washington" wrong on his dollar bills: Snopes on counterfeiter Mr. 880.
Five Dials Magazine. Number 12.
As Heinz makes the first change to its ketchup recipe in 40 years, it's worth rereading this great Malcolm Gladwell piece on branding: The Ketchup Conundrum.
A scholarly critique of the style, symbolism and sociopolitical relevance of Gilligan's Island, Here On The Island, by Lewis Napper. So great. Via Boing.
"They must be written by a real person and must also address an unreal one." FotA Ben Greenman has put a call out asking for letters to famous fictional characters, which he'll be posting here.
The Art of American Book Covers, an illustrated blog by author Richard Minsky, author of a new book of the same name.
Harry Potter and the Waterproof Pearl. "Gandalf, Harry and some random character named Peter go on an adventure to find the Little Warriors who live in a desert city in the sea." 11 Amazing fake Harry Potter books written in China.
"Ivan needs mortar to build a power station. But this mortar is all frozen! Ivan's suffering is boundless." Baby's Touch 'N Feel Guide to Russian Literature, by Summer Block.
"This tune we're too busy to hear will not be played again." -Z.
There's only one post up so far, but I get the feeling I'm going to be a big fan of The Cataloguer's Desk, Dispatches from a Rare Book Shop by Laura Massey and Adam Douglas.
Veganizing Betty Crocker, Meet the Shannons.
Simon Akam on a bestsellers list culled from the sidewalk booksellers of NYC. Via The Casual Optimist.
Lots more on the 48 Hour Magazine Project in this big group chat at Gizmodo. We're psyched to be involved.
FotA and Field-Tested Books contributor Jonathan Eig was great last night on The Daily Show promoting his new book, Get Capone, which we can attest is terrific.
"When a hundred and sixty thousand Allied troops invaded Sicily on July 10, 1943, it became clear that the Germans had fallen victim to one of the most remarkable deceptions in in modern military history."
"Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche: Summer replacement for previous town philosopher. Stays for good." Famous Philosophers and How They Were First Discovered, by Mike Sachs.
How soap operas could save the world.
"Maybe he's one of those deluded souls who truly think that stand-up comedians get their jokes from books, and that any comedy bit is somehow public domain." Patton Oswalt's fantastic response to a joke thief, parts one and two.
Meet 48 Hour Magazine: "As the name suggests, we're going to write, photograph, illustrate, design, edit, and ship a magazine in two days." With your help.
David Ogilvy showed Andy Maslen how to write for the web. Amen. Via @acejet170.
"I was sweating, my face was red, I kept putting the book down, going: This can't be this good this can't be this good." George Saunders is a Field-Tester. Find his essay and hundreds of others online or better yet, buy the book.
Good Show Sir- only the worst Sci-Fi/Fantasy book covers.
"We post articles, past and present, that we think are too long and too interesting to be read on a web browser." Meet Long Form.
"1. When you are at your parents' house, alone in their bathroom, you pick up the Reader's Digest and genuinely enjoy the jokes they use as filler items at the ends of stories. (+5 points)" Is Country Music Right For You? A Quiz. The 12th dispatch from a guy trying unsuccessfully to sell a song In Nashville.
The Awl's Annual Ranking of the Most-Read Fictional Publications.
Voltaire and the not-so-random Random House logo, by Adam Tschorn.
Dave Pell walked the Brooklyn Bridge without Facebook. Sweet.
"In order to be desirable, these archives depend on the creation and maintenance of a collective social collectomania: we must all become obsessives to sustain an economy founded on pushing digitised media." Collectomania, dig that. How To Build a Library from Things Mag.
Embracing the Digital Book by Craig Mod. Amen to all that.
Fascinating long read about Dr. Steven Hatfill, the man initially suspected in the 2001 anthrax attacks, The Wrong Man.
Anyone familar with Pitman Shorthand? We need a favor. Please email Bryan. (Gregg and Teeline need not apply.)
The new literary theft isn't plagiarism but something a lot closer to actual stealing and fencing.
"If a hyphen can save you from ambiguity, then go for it."
KG's new novel, The Thousand finally has a cover.
For SD, Good Show Sir.
Ad agency creatives show off their often painful first piece of work: Freshmen Ads. Via Denver Egotist.
"I note 'where I was' when I learned of various notable deaths, and record any related thoughts. For the last few years, I have collected these entries into annual zines." Rob Walker's fascinating Where Were You? 2009 is available free.
Terry Gross: What I Read. Endlessly fascinating story and an endlessly fascinating person.
"Fizzing. First-rate, very good, excellent: synonymous with 'stunning.' Manly slang from the 19th century. Totally using "Fizzing" in future Fresh Signals posts, look for it.
Oddly, in real life, Curious George really did save the day.
No Flood If Noah Had Known Hydraulics, from Sunday Magazine, a sweet new project from David's Ironic Sans.
A Small Gem of Negativity: The Decline Postcard. Via Maud.
"Thou shalt accept how she clearly humors you. Do not, by any means, stare at the beckoning gap at the top of her shirt. Do not, sir, stare at her hindquarters when she retreats." Midwestament, by Matthew Roberson.
How many DDs is it going to take to get me a KTTW to HH? Stumbled across while working on something else: common abbreviations and acronyms used by the "cast members" who work for Disney.
"Traveling by helicopter throughout a combat zone in body armor to hear a response to an RFP is a big change from New York, Chicago or L.A." Interesting story about advertising and production in Afghanistan.
Related to the last. Follow the Chicago Manual of Style on Twitter.
It's never a bad time to relink Paul Brians' Commonly Made Suggestions about commonly made errors, and more importantly, Non-Errors, "those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English." Which is exactly the sort of attitude up with which I will not put.
"Just you wait, I'll become famous after I'm dead about ten years." On this day in 1977 Jim Thompson died.
"Norris, 26 years his junior, was Mailer's fifth and final wife. In order to marry her, he was obliged — over the course of a few days — to divorce his third wife, then marry and immediately divorce his fourth." Memoirs of Mailer. Via Fimoculous.
"Almost every seat was full. A little boy in church clothes carefully deconstructed a vanilla cone. An old man and woman sat on the same side of a table, the woman feeding the man a Blizzard." Dairy Queen, a small-town Texas institution.
Today is the Championship at The Morning News Tournament of Books.
"Three decades after The Official Preppy Handbook was first unleashed into bookstores, a follow-up called True Prep is in the works — hoping to reignite preppy fervor, update the mindset and explain just what it means to be a Chip or a Muffy in a Barack world."
"When they were published, some where bestsellers, some were considered scandalous, and others were simply misunderstood." Beautiful covers. Beautiful website. The Penguin Decades series.
"He is perhaps best known in pop-culture circles for conducting the infamous 1989 interview with Professor Griff of Public Enemy." Ben Greeman shares his thoughts on David Mills' passing.
Charlie Stross answers the question Why are novels generally the length that they are?
Regarding The Deck and lots and lots of other things. Amen.
The Tournament of Books Quarterfinals continue today. Yesterday in the comments, John Warner told people to list the last five books they've read and he'd tell them what to read next. Check out the results.
Heartbreaking, mundane, silly, honest. Brandon Doman asked random strangers to fill up his stack of notebooks, Don't Talk to Strangers is the result. Via Mefi.
On this day in 1957, U.S. Customs agents seized 520 copies of Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" on the grounds of obscenity."
"The math is simple: my lunch was missing for 3 nights, 3 being the first odd prime number and the second smallest prime, not to mention a Fermat prime -which Ted, you're a jackass for not catching the second time around." Missing Lunch at Wikipedia, by Jimmy Chen.
The Quarterfinals continue at The Morning News Tournament of Books. Laura Miller of Salon praises the tourney and the Guilfoile/Warner daily commentary. Amen to that, especially today's chat on how we choose what to read?
Make sure to stay with this video, or you'll miss its brilliance. The Future of Publishing. Here's a chat with director Zoe Uffindell. Via Monoscope.
"What? You want to shoot some bullets into the place he fell just to make sure? What the fuck am I? Made of bullets?" Sam Burnett is "almost positive our hero is dead now."
Zulkey interviews Amelie Gillette, the Onion AV Club's "The Hater."
"Here's an appearance I did on the Joy Behar Show with Lori Gottlieb!" Comedian/author Julie Klausner learns an important lesson of double checking YouTube links before you send them off to television producers.
It's Margaret Atwood versus Victor LaValle in the final first-round match today in the The Morning News Tournament of Books, presented by our Field Notes. Also, the Zombie contenders are revealed in KG and John Warner's comments.
Dave's head is in the cloud.
A letter from a hero to Alfred A. Knopf. Norman Maclean to Charles Elliott, 1981. That cinches it, I officially love every word he wrote. Via @UChicagoPress.
They don't make computer manuals like they used to.
"The Arctic is the world's second-largest desert. The snowflakes are large and dry like the little paper circles from a three-hole punch. You can't even eat them to stay alive. They will dehydrate you. They will kill you faster than drinking no water at all." Is your workplace as rough as the Arctic?
If Star Wars were an Icelandic Saga. Via Mental Floss
"Can I use a human pregnancy test on my dog?" and hundreds more: Yahoo! Answer Fail
From a leaked memo, a strange list of "forbidden 'newsspeak' words and phrases" not to be used by anchors and reporters on WGN-AM, a local news/talk radio station.
"...translates the visual insights of his age into the patterns of everyday life." Steve Heller on becoming a designer in the Age of Aquarius.
The ads "tended to use tropes borrowed from science fiction and from mid-century modern design to convey a sense of fantasy and possibility around the process of technological emergence that was erupting." Better Than Apollo: The Space Program We Almost Had, Alexis Madrigal chats with Megan Prelinger about her fabulous-looking new book Another Science Fiction. Cha-ching.
"Airlocks provide a buffer zone between incompatible environments and are a perfect example of how architecture can function as a spatial interface." YOU SUCK: An Airlock Lexicon.
Real doctors review each episode of the medical drama tv show House.
At Last- the full story on how Facebook was founded. Via MeFi.
You're Not Funny by Earl Pomerantz.
"Wolfe showing up to many meetings with freshly-written material, which Perkins would read, admire, and mostly cut." On this day in 1935 Thomas Wolfe's Of Time and the River was published.
"Can we call ourselves an institution yet?" The sixth edition of The Morning News Tournament of Books kicks off today.
"You used to hustle ping pong with David Mamet, right? Yeah." Zulkey interviews Jonathan Katz, who continues to win my vote as greatest person ever.
"This was Team USA's only major disappointment in the games, with American favorite Triage Jansen bowing out midway through the race when she realized she had to be at work the next morning an hour earlier than she"d realized." 24th Existential Olympics, by Jonathan Kaufman Nathan.
Walmart versus Whole Foods; The Great Grocery Smackdown.
Now that SD is back from Europe, I can post this. Fascinating and frightening long read about The Last Four Minutes of Air France Flight 447.
Reading while biking. Fernando Pessoa's poem "The Keeper of Sheep" printed on the road for bicyclists in Lisbon.
From the New York Times bestselling author of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies comes the true history of our sixteenth president. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.
Ken Burns and Robert Stone at the NYPL, on Fora TV.
The Death of Film Criticism.
The brackets are announced for this year's Morning News Tournament of Books (sponsored by Field Notes this year!) and it's a very tough field to handicap. Luckily, Andrew Seal has the inside dope in his Introduction to Nerdhalla.
Winston Hearn writes, "Here's a link to the entire archive of the Weekly World News, thanks to Google Books. Two clicks in, and I discovered how to write in fourth-person."
A time suck you can feel good about: True Slant's amazing compilation of the Best Journalism of 2009.
A Robbery of Three Liberal Arts Graduates: The Police Report, by Eliot Nelson.
Read the correction at the end.
Ten rules for writing fiction from people who know. Elmore Leonard, "Try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip." Roddy Doyle. "Do not place a photograph of your favourite author on your desk, especially if the author is one of the famous ones who committed suicide."
Status, Vol. 1. A lavishly designed compilation of inspiring, funny, say-what status messages from both sides of the Atlantic.
"The Great Gatsby is an inspired title, one for the ages, but it wasn't Fitzgerald's idea. He wanted to call the novel Trimalchio in West Egg, which sounds like something Dr. Seuss might have dreamed up for The Playboy Channel." What makes a good title? Via MeFi.
What we are supposed to do when we are at our best. This goes directly to the top of my daily bookmark list, a series of personal, beautiful posts by .J. S. Yingling. I love today's and this one too. Man. Thanks a million to Richard Niejelski for sending the link.
"If your neighbour's beard is on fire, you should go soak yours in water." Pablo Defendini On Production, for The New Sleekness. Amen. Via Dan Wagstaff.
Somebody call Skully and Mulder, the UK just released a slew of UFO-related documents dating from 1994-2000. Flying Toblerones?
Are you reading Tweetage Wasteland? Thought so.
Green Marker.
From the McSw archives, I lost my greeting-card gig because of my drinking. By Dan Kennedy.
The 33rd Degree.
The World's Smallest Postal Service.
The Early Woody Allen 1952-1971.
Dick Francis RIP.
"(59) Tell her how you feel while you stand at the foot of the huge bed and look upon her sleeping body, while cursing yourself for being a ghost whose words cannot be heard by the living." Paul Ford's 100 Ways To Say "I Love You."
Two previously known and 15 brand-new closing signatures, to be inserted at the end of your love letters for Valentine's or any other day, by Mike Sacks.
A Broken Heart, Girl, Ain't a Thing You Collect. KG's helpful compendium of inappropriate Valentine's gifts.
Related to the last. I didn't really get what it was about when I was eleven, but I kept going back to it, over and over again. I'm not sure I really get it now either, but here it is. The Last Whole Earth Catalog from June of 1971.
A good read for times like right now, when I probably should be doing something else: Scott Hansen talks to other creative folk about their strategies for overcoming creative block.
On this day in 1926, Ernest Hemingway pulled a fast one on one publisher to sign with another.
"My deft touch with magazine collages will no doubt lend immediate impact to your companies presentations." A cover letter from an art major seeking a job that literally requires him to apply the skills he learned in school, by Andrew Miller.
"Advertising agency of the future sounds a bit like horse drawn carriage of the future." Amen. A thoughtful piece by Bud Caddell.
"My stomach lurched a little when I realized that it was Salinger, for real, on the other end of the phone, speaking rather too loudly and seeming a bit confused by my voice..." Joanna Smith Rakoff on answering J. D. Salinger's' mail.
Sumedicina, a data fiction project, that tells a story through infographics.
Mr. Pell killed his rice cooker and other tales from the excellent and excellently titled Tweetage Wasteland. Bookmarked.
Paul: More! Always more! I love putting things on the web. I like the paywall because it helps us pay writers and writers should be paid. Choire: *blinks* Choire Sicha and Paul Ford chat about magazines and the web. So awesome I probably would have paid for it.
Inside the diary of a 17-year-old, 17 years later. Kevin Pang takes a look at our pal Andrew Huff's 1954 project for the Trib.
A corpse, a false identity, spies galore, and a pre-Bond Ian Flemming. Reading this two part excerpt of Ben MacIntyre's new book Operation Mincemeat will have just one result: Cha-ching.
Tangentially related to the last. The edition of Norman MacLean's A River Runs Through It designed and illustrated with wood engravings by Barry Moser is a must-have. Also, I love this photo of MacLean by Veronica C. Wald.
Letters to dead people.
Some of Jason Santa Maria's books.
Related to the last and irreconcilable, this photo and this one.
"It settles on being a hybrid of Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure and Herk Harvey's 1962 horror film, Carnival of Souls." Local film critic Jonathan Miller has begun reviewing campaign ads.
Relink on today's news. Here's a letter JDS wrote in 1957 to a producer interested in filming Catcher in the Rye. Salinger's refusal, as you might expect, is a firm one and his reasons unimpeachable.
JDS stories in The New Yorker including the perfect, "A Perfect Day for Bannanafish."
"Oh, it isn't finished. It's about a kid in New York during the Christmas holidays." Robert Giroux on resigning from Harcourt after they refused to publish Catcher in the Rye. Via Maud Newton.
"Just because Cyber Policeman and Robocop are both set in a dystopian Detroit and involve robots, it does not mean they are the same movie."
PSFK interviews our current guest editor, Rob Walker, about the second round of his Significant Objects project. A list of all the other brilliant people who have helped us by guest editing Fresh Signals can be found here.
"This is your lunch starring: Sir Walter Strawberry, Claudia Cantaloupe, Blackberry Jones with a guest appearance by Chicken Salad Sammy." Lunch notes from my permanent roommate.
So you know, how to use a semicolon.
"Edmund Wilson regrets that it is impossible for him to:"
FotA Ben Greenman has added a second act to his Edwards! The Musical.
Has the 60-year-old tradition of roses and cognac come to an end? The mysterious stranger, or the "Poe Toaster," failed to show up at Edgar Allen Poe's grave this week to celebrate his birthday.
You are following along as Charlie Hopper tries to sell a song in Nashville, aren't you? Dispatch 7: Verse Verse Lift Chorus Verse Lift Chorus Bridge Chorus.
Stock and Flow, a metaphor from economics smartly applied to digital creation, by Robin Sloane.
"In the autumn of 1992, on a school-sponsored trip to Stratford, Ontario, for the Shakespeare Festival, I wandered into a used bookstore with some friends and made an unexpected find: a completely blank datebook from 1954." Three years align for Andrew Huff. Awesome.
Look At F-ing Idea For A Blog To Book Deal. Amusing. Drunk Or Southern? is a good one.
"...and then a rippled yam." Writing about sex and how not to do it, by Sonya Chung.
Alex Bogusky's response to the anonymous "you will be responsible for and held accountable for the murder of a bear" note he received, taped to his door. Via Denver Egotist.
"A testament to determination and the will to live." I'll say. An account of an auto-appendectomy in the Antarctic. Via Mefi.
"As I.D.'s sole editor in New York working alongside the ad salespeople, my friend spent the next year trying to manage staff in another state whom, he complained, he had not been allowed to hire and who had never heard of Philip Johnson."
"What do you mean, she'll get here 'when she comes'? That's not a time. How can I plan around that?" Mom Takes Children's Songs Literally, by Sarah Schmelling.
Rob Giampietro on the typewriter as a thing to be feared. Serial Series, Part 6. Via Byrdhouse.
ISO50 interviews Experimental Jetset. Excellent.
"Back when I was a boy, I bought a children's book at my town's library book sale called 2010: Living in the Future by Geoffrey Hoyle... I've somehow managed to hang onto it for 25 years and now, suddenly, here we are: 2010. I'm reproducing this long out-of-print book here to see how we're doing." -Daniel Sinker.
The National Archives have built an online exhibit to tell the story of When Nixon Met Elvis. There's also a great. goofy film about the strange encounter, Elvis Meets Nixon.
Paul Ford is this week's Non-Expert at TMN, he answers the question Is there an afterlife? If you scroll down a bit you can listen to him read it aloud. You should do that.
Related to below: Boontling, the language developed in the late 1800s and spoken by residents of Boonville, CA. I have a translation dictionary you can borrow, if anyone's dishing to jape out to Boont.
A forged will, bad blood, angry scholars and fans. Fascinating story behind the state of Kerouac's estate.
Write shorter.
FotA Ben Greenman passes along his "new musical to banish the old year forever": Fragments from Balloon Boy! The Musical.
This reminds me of how I'd answer test questions in high school when I hadn't studied any of the material (and why it's surprising that I still graduated, given how much I enjoyed doing it): Biography: Walt Whitman.
Little Housing Crisis on the Prairie, by Susan Schorn. Tangentially related, follow Half Pint Ingalls on Twitter.
"People haven't been just reporting on Grills's work: he's being eviscerated for it." The story behind epidemiologist Nathan Grills' medical journal-published hoax "Santa Claus: A Public Health Pariah?"
Laredo, Texas is soon to become the largest US city without bookstore. Via J-Walk.
One drawing for every page of Moby Dick.
Martha Scotford's "short tale of legal, design and production choreography." Ulysses: Fast Track to 1934 Best Seller. Great.
"When all the elements of a camel-case compound are words that could stand on their own, slice it open: Master Card, Price Waterhouse Coopers, Word Perfect. When some elements are letters or word fragments, sew it up and capitalize conventionally: Iphone, Ebay, Fedex." The Knee-Capping of Intercapping, by Caleb Crain. Amen.
The Harry Potter economy.
"They apparently thought they could squish the book like a bug, but were quickly reminded what country we live in." Zulkey interviews Michael Gross, the author of one of the best books of the year, Rogues' Gallery: The Secret History of the Moguls and the Money that Made the Metropolitan Museum.
"That could even be the secret--the emotionless efficiency of Swedish technology, paradoxically combined with the wicked allure of the pitiless elfin avenger, plus a dash of paranoia surrounding the author's demise." Vanity Fair looks at the allure of author Stieg Larsson and his books.
"This works like an advent calendar, every day from the 10th to the 24th of December a new window will open with a fresh and unsettling story behind it. To open the door click the rodent on the correct day." Terrifying Tales for Christmas. Via Things.
The world's best sommelier vs. the world's worst customer.
A fave entry in this year's Regret the Error corrections round-up. From the LA Times, "Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday's Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday."
Amazon's editors choose their Best Books of 2009.
Related to the last. Eliot reading The Waste Land.
"Eliot's manuscript title for the poem was 'He Do the Police in Different Voices,' taken from Dickens's Our Mutual Friend, where the orphan Sloppy is so praised for his dramatic abilities when reading out the crime news." On this day in 1922 The Waste Land was published.
"I'll try to tell you what my attitude is to the stage and screen rights of The Catcher in the Rye. I've sung this tune quite a few times, so if my heart doesn't seem to be in it, try to be tolerant..." --J. D. Salinger. Via TMN.
New Scientist's best books of 2009.
"How something as simple as typography can drive you toward or away from that $39 steak." Menu Mind Games by William Poundstone. Via Jake.
Sweet Juniper's second in a series of great profiles on local businesses in Detroit: R. Hirt Jr., Est. 1887.
"Although it topples a good many cherished myths, and does so with patent glee, it cannot properly be called revisionist for there has never been a lucid and comprehensive presentation of the Bauhaus to revise." The New Criterion reviews the current MoMA exhibit Bauhaus 1919-1933: Workshops for Modernity
The Year's Work in Lebowski Studies, from Indiana University Press.
I Am Locking the Wikipedia Article On Our Sex Life, by Alan Trotter.
"Frontier American journalism preserved a vestige of the low-church impulse toward universal literacy whereby the new country imagined it could read and write itself into existence. We were the Gutenberg Nation." Final Edition: Twilight of the American newspaper, by Richard Rodriguez. Brilliant.
"Acknowledging that few readers, if any, read exclusively newly published books, we've asked our regular contributors and distinguished guests to name, from all the books they read this year, the one(s) that meant the most to them." A Year in Reading from The Millions.
The San Francisco Panorama is published today.
Regarding today's Eye, The Letters, transcribed, translated, illustrated and annotated at the Van Gogh Museum. See you in a few hours.
"I keep checking the rearview mirror anyway. From this point on, there's no such thing as sure. Being too sure will get me caught." Evan tries to vanish.
How do the Somali pirates fund their hijackings? They have their own stock exchange.
Where do you begin when you decide to write to everyone in the world?
Slashfilm's got a peek at some of the items from the new book Star Wars: 1,000 Collectibles: Memorabilia and Stories from a Galaxy Far, Far Away.
Local note: Our SD will unveil a new Zamboni film as writers, artists and comedians opine on the subject of hockey at The Encyclopedia Show tonight at the Chopin Theatre.
"Writers should take themselves more seriously than those at Maxim, which we've actually glanced at once or twice, but shouldn't be as conceited as we imagine the writers at GQ are."
Writing the Submission Guidelines for Magazines I've Never Read, by Ralph Gamelli.
Today's long read, The Rise and Fall of Design Within Reach.
"I would be delighted to spend my free time creating logos and pie charts for you based on further vague promises of future possible payment." Awesome. Via Scott Hansen.
A huge collection of vintage mid-century children's books.
A fun video tour through the alphabet of ABC3D, a pop-up book by Marion Bataille which I found listed in this Hilobrow compendium of pop-up book videos which popped up at the excellent Jacket Copy from the LAT.
Goodnight Keith Moon.
Fray #3 is now available. Hooray for Sex & Death.
Teddy Wayne's Unpopular Proverbs: Brevity. For Thanksgiving.
Cruel nicknames for overweight vampires.
Passages from the short list for this year's Literary Review's 2009 bad sex in fiction award.
The uncollected stories of JD Salinger collected.
The Guardian has a nice interview with author Neil Gaiman about the award-winning The Graveyard Book. You can watch him read the book here.
The Pop-Up Book of Phobias.
"A man and a woman lie in bed at night in the short hour between kid sleep and parent sleep, turning down page corners as they read. She is leafing through a fashion magazine, he through a cookbook." Gopnik on Why we use cookbooks.
Sage advice from Mr. Bierut, The lazy designer's guide to success. Via David Airey.
"That's why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It's a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don't want to die." Der Spiegel interviews Umberto Eco, who has curated The Infinity of Lists, a current exhibition at The Louvre.
"I wouldn't choose it as a font for St. Agnes Church even as a joke. Every time I go by, my vacation is, for a moment, ruined." Mistakes in typography grate the purists
"Sorry folks, the most evident way of doing something is typically the way that I do it." Frank Chimero owns up.
So you know, how to write a great novel
"Conversation is more the nuts and bolts of hardware retail than actual nuts and bolts." Sweet Juniper's Jim Griffioen on his favorite hardware store, Detroit's Busy Bee Hardware.
The Women of Bauhaus.
"It was testament to the power of print. And to the fact that old media still has a few bullets in its gun." We'll Order Now What They Ordered Then, by KG.
"When 'The Wire' gained popularity in Great Britain, we were contacted by a London-based journalist who proposed a job swap." Two crime reporters swap beats and wrote about the experience about it over at Crime: A Tale of Two Cities. Via MeFi.
"By the time the author finished his lunch, he had become a multi-millionaire." Mandership posts by Artemy Lebedev don't show up very often but they're welcome when they do. Browse archives.
Over at the You're The Boss blog at the NYT, a column is written explaining 100 things restaurant staffers should never do. Waiter Rant responds.
In this online age, writing correctly can be very difficult. Fortunately the Fake AP Stylebook is at your command with great tips like "In research papers, comic books should be cited thusly: 'This was from the most kick-ass issue of The Punisher EVER!!!'"
Christopher Walken performs Lady Gaga's Poker Face as only he can. Via Mental Floss.
The winners have been posted from A Journey Round My Skull's first ever bookplate contest, From the Library of the Evil Orchid. Great work all round.
Great collection of Sci-Fi book covers, sets I and II.
For the next time you're trying to spell something over the phone: the Nearly Anacrophonic Phonetic Alphabet, which "hews much more closely to the basic idea of anacrophony than any other phonetic alphabet of which we are aware." Thanks Everett.
Tonight, 71 years to the minute, listen to the radio broadcast that panicked people all over the country, Orson Welles' War of the Worlds.
A Sam Weber illustrated Lord of the Flies is due out in December. Cha-ching.
Heed it well, young costumed beggars.
"'Injun Summer,' by John T. McCutcheon, appeared on the front cover of the Chicago Tribune Sunday magazine every autumn from 1907 until 1986, looking exactly as it does here." -Roger Ebert.
So you know. The order by which people are admitted to heaven, by Brian Doyle. Via TMN.
"I realised that my own way was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding." On this day in 1958, CP hero Samuel Beckett's "Krapp's Last Tape" was first performed.
A 1980's pop up guide to the personal computer. Via Look at This.
The Visual Miscellaneum by David McCandless is available for pre-order, and judging from these shots, looks just beautiful. Via The Minister.
Living on $500,000 a Year, what F. Scott Fitzgerald's tax returns reveal about his life and times, by William J. Quirk. Via Mefi.
John Irving starts writing a novel with the last line and other insights shared in this interview with the New Statesman. Hmm, really? Case in point from APFOM, "O God -- please give him back! I shall keep asking You." Via LHB.
Related to the last, John Moe is Field Tester.
"I know I could get counseling or medication to get this whole megalomania thing under control but, again, there are so many opportunities for joy." John Moe interviews Dr. Cruelty regarding the supervillain sense of humor.
FoTA Edward Lifson has a great interview with Chicago-based architect/preservationist Grahm Balkany over at Metropolis. Hey Daley, pay attention!
Related to the last. "Nitsche, however, rejected the Neue Grafik, or Swiss International Style, that drew nourishment from the Bauhaus legacy, referring to it as 'a little too cold for our uses,' and stayed 'pretty much with the classical typefaces.' He insists that 'I really never went outside of my love for Didot.'" Amen. The Reluctant Modernist by Steven Heller. A must-read.
Alfred Nobel "had a lifelong fear of being buried alive, and in his will he left instructions to have his arteries cut after death, just to be sure."
Book City Jackets edition no. 2.
Candygram #2: Jackpot by John Gruber.
"Do not send one-word emails of 'thanks.' Thanks." From the brand-spanking new Bobulate.
A Review Of The Photography In My Gynecologist's Office, by Kyria Abrahams.
150 years ago tonight, on October 16, 1859, John Brown and twenty-one other men launched an attack on the Federal Arsenal at Harpers Ferry. Excellent analysis and a revision of conventional historical wisdom by Karen Whitman. Must read, for history dorks.
On the Length of Subtitles in Many Old, Rare and Antiquarian Books Or, the Custom of Publishers of olde to Load the title page with a Reader's Digest condensed version of the Contents so complete that when finished perusing one's need to Read the Actual Book is obviated and further Exploration Unnecessary.
The Grammar Nerd Corrective Label Pack.
Download Dear Monsieur Picasso by Frederick Baldwin. Great story on meeting the man.
At 11am Chicago time Neil Gaiman will begin an exquisite corpse story on the BBC Audiobooks America Twitter account with a single tweet. Here's how to participate.
Whoops, meant to post this a couple days ago, when we talked about it at Make Think in Memphis. Zadie Smith reading Frank O'Hara's "Animals." From our quite accidental Verse By Voice project.
"Every day for one hundred days (from October 30, 2008 to February 6, 2009) I picked a paint chip out of a bag and responded to it with a short writing. I have selected my favorite forty, titling each writing with the number of the day it was written (out of 100) and the name of the color from that day's paint chip."
Roger is right, books do furnish a life.
For October, by JSM and friends, Candygrams.
Related to the last and just about the funniest thing a parent will ever read. "Sit just as I have told you, and do not lean to one side or the other, nor slide down until you are nearly slid away. Heed me; for if you sit like that, your hair will go into the syrup. And now behold, even as I have said, it has come to pass." Frazier's Laws Concerning Food and Drink.
There once was a site on the net... The Omnificent English Dictionary in Limerick Form.
News that, thanks to the success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, more literary monster mashups are in store, including Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter and Little Women and Werewolves.
"Thinking that you might be talking about a different 'Well of Cantankerous Souls,' or that the dungeon might have recently become vacant, we sent our intern Trevor to scout out the location..." Adventure Capital by Matthew Baldwin. Yeah, the credit markets are a bitch right now.
A trailer for The Onion A.V. Club's new Inventory book, which features lots of great writing by friends of the agency and one wife of the agency.
Related. Maud was a Field Tester for us. Read all the reviews online or better yet, buy the book.
"My Mother was a preacher until the cops shut her down." How's that for an opening sentence? Narrative Magazine has awarded Maud Newton its annual fiction prize for an excerpt from When the Flock Changed. Sweet.
Thousands of hyphens perish as English marches on.
For BB. From the prog rock ice cream shoppe: flavors inspired by a certain Canadian power trio, by Matt Bull.
The next book for Infinite Summer is Dracula, with a trio of excellent guides. Perfect weather for it in Chicago today. Get on it.
"Eclecticism was a viable and intelligent decision. While consistent design for a series of related books makes good strategic sense, these books were bound together by the editors' judgment." Covering the Good Books by Steven Heller.
I had the dream again.
What if there was physical proof that the Super Mario Bros mythology existed a long time ago on a lost chain of islands in the Pacific Ocean? The Excavation of Mushroom Island.
A scan of Vladimir Nabokov's notes about a translation of The Metamorphosis.
Umberto Eco on the lost art of handwriting.
"Our profitability has been a real drag on our valuation," said Mr. Fried. Big, exciting news for our office mates. Congrats guys.
Lusting after this. John M. Carrera's Pictorial Webster's, a short-run, hand-crafted volume of classic dictionary engravings reborn in a fine-press edition. It looks positively amazing. Here's a detailed video on the project and a chance to win one from Chronicle Books. Thanks for the tip to Anthony Drehfal, editor of Block & Burin, highly recommended.
Spelling mistakes that even smart people make.
KV's first public reading of Breakfast of Champions, three years before it was published, on May 4, 1970 at the 92nd Street Y in NYC. Do I need to say anything more?
"I theorize that everyone has what I call an inconvenience threshold (IT), a point at which something is so annoying that it actually galvanizes them into action."
Back to School with Rosecrans in the NYT.
Sci-fi from 1752! Voltaire's Micromegas.
Infinite Summer's end.
"Below we have selected 20 phrases that may grate on the ear. It's not a definitive list. It couldn't be: he has published five novels, each around 500 pages long, and the arguments over which are the worst bits will go on for a while." The Telegraph picks Da Vinci Code author Dan Brown's 20 worst sentences.
This fall might see the end of the Twilight phenomenon as angels are the new vampires. And with Wings of Desire coming out on Blu-ray in a couple of months, it's perfect timing (what teen doesn't love Wim Wenders?).
"Kill the pig! Slash its throat! Drink its blood!" On this day in 1954 Wiillam Golding's Lord of the Flies was published after being rejected by 21 publishers.
The anthology I anxiously await every year and pre-order about three months early has finally been released: The Best American Crime Reporting 2009. If you need me, I'll be hiding out back, sneaking reads.
"Making love became something they did, like bowling or playing tennis. Then it became everything. Tennis and bowling were subordinate." Key words with Peter and Jane Part 1 by Amy at Story blog.
"Are You There God? It's Me, a Sexy Vampire." In case Claire's new young-adult novel doesn't sell here are her backup ideas.
Otto Tschumi's amazing 1942 Büchergilde Edition of Moby Dick.
Related to the last. Letters of Note is a great resource and impossible to stop reading. Just one more...
A bit of humor from JFK in 1961: "I will not sign this letter." Via J-Walk.
"Please design and build me a house. I am not quite sure of what I need, so you should use your discretion." For Matt, If Architects had to work like Web Designers.
About four years ago Charlie Hopper got the idea that he should try to write a song and see if he could sell it to Nashville. So far he hasn't. Mopping Up the Blood, Dispatch #1 from a McSweeney's columnist-contest winner.
"It rarely takes more than a page to recognize that you're in the presence of someone who can write, but it only takes a sentence to know you're dealing with someone who can't." Josh Olson in The Voice.
Field Tester John Moe on why he didn't read Infinite Jest this summer. Wow.
A literary term I wasn't familiar with until just a second ago: the cozy mystery, a type of story "which includes a bloodless crime and contains very little violence, sex, or coarse language."
We Made This on the special edition do it yourself covers for Douglas Coupland's new novel Generation A.
FotA Fuzzy Gerdes unboxing An Off Year.
Books from my travels by Charles Brock. Splendid. Thanks Marshall.
KG's got a nice piece on a local 16 year old crime blogger with autism over at The Outfit.
"That's why people invent fights. That's why we're drawn to sports. That's why we act like everything that happens to us is such a big deal." Kurt Vonnegut Explains Drama. Via J-Walk.
A Book Lover's Guide to IKEA seating. Via Czeltic Girl.
ReadyMade digs through their archives and finds copies of Apartment Life from the mid-70s.
Scents and the City.
I Lift My Lamp Beside the Golden Door.
Ikea and The Font War.
With Andy's Anagram Solver, my name becomes "Island Worshipper," and the wife's becomes "'Be congruent,' lulls Josh."
Long read of the day, One Rogue Wave.
My maternal grandparents, early 1970's. Read the notes. Via Sheila.
Mapping Hutt space, Star Wars: The Essential Atlas.
Granola bars for me next road trip for sure, What's inside a Slim Jim.
"Rockin' It, Frat-Party Style: A Short Story Geared to College Students Written By a 30-Something Author. Awesome. That author is Mike Sacks, who has provided regular Field-Tests for us, including this journey with ancient Icelanders to Greenwood Mississippi.
"After gym class, Bella heads to the office and sees Edward trying to change biology classes. She thinks it's impossible that someone can dislike her so much. I don't like her. She brags too much." Dan's blogging his reading of Twilight.
A glossary of screenwriting and filmmaking terms.
Johnny Dee's favorite one-star reviews from Amazon.
The staff at The Onion A.V. Club writes individual pieces about Art We Tried Too Late, including my lovely wife's disinterest in Harry Potter. Take that, BB and MS.
Yay! Pre-order our officemates' new book, Rework by 37signals. We know how much effort went into it. Guaranteed to be great.
The New Yorker has Dave Eggers's Max at Sea for those too excited to wait for the movie. Which means me.
The New York Times has discovered The Moth, but why do they put it under Fashion & Style instead of Arts?
"I live and travel to eat. Simple as that." And lucky for us, take pictures. The Ulterior Epicure.
"The second most common approach is what we'll call the 'I hate stuff and want to write about it,' column." Results from McSweeney's Columnist Contest.
Four days in North Korea.
Related to the last: If you like creepy tunnels under Red Hook, H.P. Lovecraft has a story for you.
"See, I don't really trust you until we talk a little shit and then I see your bookshelf." Rands is The Book Stalker.
A three part series on the rapid modernization of China and the disappearance of the traditional Hutong neighborhoods, Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.
BBC correspondent Justin Webb on returning to the UK after 8 years of living in the US.
Kraft paper book covers from Book City Jackets. Via d*s.
Metroid's Samus Aran Speaks Out About Gay Marriage.
Hey Oscar Wilde! It's Clobbering Time!!! Page after page of authors or literary characters drawn by illustrators and comic artists. I especially love the latest additions by Scott Campbell.
For the ladies, fascinating article on Laura Wilder, author of Little House on the Prairie, Wilder Women.
"Unseen, in the background, Fate was quietly slipping the lead into the boxing glove" and other random quotes from the greatest comic writer who ever lived, P.G. Wodehouse.
Big thanks to our Guest Editor Henry Cline for all his great work here in July. Now that we've reached the end of the month, Henry wanted to share a kind of parting gift with us: the launch of his Radio First Termer Restoration Project, which is telling the story and restoring audio tapes of a pirate radio station that broadcasted out of a Saigon brothel during the Vietnam War, hosted by an anonymous Air Force sergeant known only as "Dave Rabbit."
Related to the last, the Citizen Kane of corporate folktales, the mighty, mighty House of Wigs by Joshua Allen. For God's sake, click on the little arrows that mean "more." See you in a couple hours.
"Unable to convince her husband of his mentor's treachery, she fled under cover of darkness to Business School." From Grant Munroe's Corporate Folktales: The Tale of the CTO's Apprentice's Wife. See also How the Operations Analyst Slew the Monster of the 37th Floor Server Room.
"'You know, there are people at the office who think I got this job by sleeping with you. Isn't that horrible?' I said during a meal. He looked shocked and then laughed. 'Do me a favor. Please don't deny it.'" Carol Joynt's great piece about being one of Walter Cronkite's staff reporters. Remembering Old Iron Pants.
The New Yorker's Nicholas Baker's excellent piece "Kindle and the Future of Reading."
The recently discovered coded message postcards sent between spies in the 1950s by suspected double agent Graham Mitchell during the Cold War.
KG on Allan Seager and the true story of perhaps the most ripped-off plot in literary history.
"In a twist that the master satirist would have appreciated, Kurt Vonnegut continues his posthumous career despite the apparent impediments to his productivity."
A couple opinions from Artemy Lebedev. Amen.
Frank McCourt was Daniel Radosh's high-school English teacher. Check the video bit too.
Not exactly sure what this is, but very intrigued and eager to see it launched in two days: We Are The Friction, described as "an international illustration and short fiction cage match between 24 writers and illustrators (in handy book form)." Via Byrdhouse.
"Well, I've sold the paper to the Chinese," says former publisher of The Onion, T. Herman Zweibel.
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.
"Sanity Check: The meeting just before the meeting when you explain that things are going badly." Rands on The Words You Wear. Via John Gruber.
"Overmind: a single, non-material consciousness composed of the consciousnesses of a large number of beings." From the latest listings of the OED Science Fiction Citations site. Via @H_FJ.
Cardboard Love.
"Have you ever experienced that eerie feeling of a thought popping into your head as if from nowhere, with no clue as to why you had that particular idea at that particular time?" There's science behind that, really interesting read, Disorderly genius: How chaos drives the brain.
This month marked the publication of two great new books by FotA and multi-year Field-Tested Books contributors, Mike Sacks and Nathan Rabin. Mike's is And Here's the Kicker: Conversations with Humor Writers on Their Craft and the Industry and Nathan's is the memoir The Big Rewind. Both are hilarious and come highly recommended.
"In April 2009, we sent a personal, handwritten letter to each of the 467 households in the small Irish village of Cushendall. We hoped these unsolicited letters would prompt neighbourly discussion, spreading across the town, promoting community curiosity." Mysterious Letters.
"If you find yourself in the sole company of graphic designers, this book will likely address every professional subject that might arise, giving you enough information to laugh at an inside joke or nod in knowing agreement at a thoughtful reference." Enter to win your free copy of Graphic Design, Referenced over at idsgn.
Bidding on All-American Necking Team Button, made irresistible by Susannah Breslin. God, Significant Objects is such a great idea.
Now and Then, Sex Still Sells.
More greatness from the Infinite Summer project, KG, DFW, a pulley and a big load of bricks.
"You can't do that with glass, can you?" Apparently, you can. Still not so much for me, thanks.
Things Kirsten Giebutowski has written in cover letters. Fab.
"LEVEL 4: A Denny's restaurant near a high school right after a school play ends." The 9 Levels of Hell For The Living.
FotA Rob Walker has just launched Significant Objects, wherein writers invent stories about objects purchased from thrift stores and garage sales and distributed by the project's curators, then later sold again on eBay with each piece's new back story.
"If a book is lost, then someone will write it again, eventually." A Working Library Reading Note on With Borges.
How McDonald's conquered France.
"If they need high resolution images, make sure you send them 72 dpi thumbnails." Salt Publishing's advice on how to take a bad author photo.
Related to MS' post below: one of the best This American Life episodes, featuring Kurt Eichenwald who talks about the ADM price fixing scandal. The Informant, the book, is also comes highly recommended.
"I don't want to admit to being so superficial as to structure an entire Internet-wide event around a catchy title ... so I won't."
Matthew chats with the LA Times about the Infinite Summer project.
Michael Rubin's excellent Droidmaker: George Lucas and the Digital Revolution is now available as a free pdf download. Here's a bit more on the book from The Binary Bonsai.
On this date in 1613, The Globe burned.
Zulkey's interview with Kasper Hauser, the San Francisco-based comedy group you've likely heard on This American Life and/or All Things Considered.
Former CP crew member Dave Reidy is profiled by TOC on the release of his debut collection of stories, Captive Audience.
"Sadly, Nurse Mosconi was unable to keep away from the baby and within seconds her heart was broken."
John Moe's Pop-Song Correspondences, Part XX. Also here's John field-testing Carver's WWTAWWTAL.
Fiction's Dirty Little Secret, KG's first Infinite Summer post is a beauty.
Have you bookmarked Jan Chipchase's Future Perfect yet?
"Hold on, I've seen this before: How Star Wars, Star Trek, The Matrix, and Harry Potter are actually the same movie."
"Don't. It's just that simple. Pick something else. Don't do it. Go become a rug cleaner like your mother suggested." Susannah Breslin's Letter to a Young Writer. Via Murketing.
Warming up for the 21st. How to Read Infinite Jest.
Giving you lots of things to lose sleep over for the past four decades: The Top 10 Most Absurd Time Magazine Covers of the Past 40 Years. Not included and definitely not as scary, but my pick for worst: 2006's Person of the Year.
On this day in 1982 John Cheever died at the age of seventy in Ossining, New York. Related and entertaining, Cheever and Updike on Cavett.
"radiidin: 'non-holiday, a time allegedly a holiday but actually so much a burden because of work and preparations that it is a dreaded occasion; especially when there are too many guests and none of them help.'" Arika Okrent's 10 favorite invented words. Via Gapers Block.
I Am Poseidon! God of the Sea! I Also Teach Water Aerobics On Saturdays, by Colin Nissan.
On last post for Bloomsday. Geoff wonders what would happen if you fed all of Ulysses into a 3D printer?
Have just discovered the work of Sue Bentley, author of the Magic Kitten, Magic Puppy, and Magic Ponies series, all of which have the brightest, most glittery covers ever. They're hypnotic.
For Bloomsday. The man himself in Lego.
For Bloomsday. "A short animated riff on Joyce's Ulysses, in which actual pages from the book serve as frames, with figures painted over text. Joyce himself provides the vocal track."
For Bloomsday. "Mr. Joyce manages to give the effect of unedited human minds, drifting aimlessly along from one triviality to another, confused and diverted by memory, by sensation and by inhibition, is, in short, perhaps the most faithful X-ray ever taken of the ordinary human consciousness." Edmund Wilson's July 5, 1922 review of Ulysses for TNR. "Mr. Joyce has told the whole truth."
For Bloomsday. Ulysses, selectively annotated with images. Fab.
For Bloomsday. "In 1924, 1 went to the office of His Master's Voice in Paris to ask them if they would record a reading by James Joyce from Ulysses." -Sylvia Beach.
For Bloomsday. Pitch 'n' Putt with Jim Joyce and Sam Beckett, a short film by Bórd Scannán na hEireann.
"If The New York Times ever strikes you as an abstruse glut of antediluvian perorations..." You could look it up.
Picking apart a Silva Thins cigarette ad from 1978 and finding the copywriting fallacy therein. Via One Good Move.
Scott Brick's audiobook narrator contest. Great idea. Check KG's post at The Outfit for some background.
"Meanwhile, in the Web world, I've pretty much heard/seen enough about steampunk. And I don't need to see any more pictures of unlikely things made of Legos." Zulkey's interview with Rob Walker of the NY Times' Consumed, Murketing, and stealing the whole show in Objectified.
Regarding the Infinite Summer project, what to eat before a really big meal.
"'Chapter eight,' he said. 'No, wait. Chapter nine.' When I left a few minutes later, he was on chapter ten. By the weekend, he had finished the entire work, a fourteen-hundred-page novel about foot fetishists in Malaysia." FotA Ben Greenman shares a very personal story about the dangers of Lit Juicing within the book community.
Following the last: the first 27 pages of The Woman Chaser. You'll be hooked after the first few paragraphs. And so you don't have to go searching: here's the link to order the book.
"When the other try-outs began to arrive, I was alternately relieved (I wasn't the fattest or most socially awkward person there) and terrified (the presence of so many bad haircuts and shabby gaits was a guarantee I was up against some brilliant titans of trivia)." FotA and Field-Tested Books contributor Leonard Pierce travelled to Chicago this week to try out for Jeopardy.
For DW: Zulkey interviews Jennifer Koppelman Hutt of Whatever, Martha! fame.
"Posted in Adultery, Death Penalty, Murder, Seduction, Unwritten Law." The Hope Chest, bad news from the past. Thanks Whet.
5000 Pages of Wikipedia's featured articles printed and bound.
7. :-X only w/ m8. God Texts the 10 Commandments by Jamie Quatro.
Today marks the official publication of CP alum Dave Reidy's short story collection Captive Audience. We've all been reading the advance copy and enjoying each and every page. A well-earned, hearty congratulations, Dave.
"Defection is daunting. So is starting a new, free life." Escaping North Korea.
Now available for pre-order: The Onion A.V. Club's Inventory: 16 Films Featuring Manic Pixie Dream Girls, 10 Great Songs Nearly Ruined by Saxophone, and 100 More Obsessively Specific Pop-Culture Lists, which features the writing of numerous FotA, including one I'm married to.
"Admitting it is the first step toward reading it." KG joins Matthew Baldwin, TMN and others in tackling DFW's Infinite Jest a bit at a time, in public. Infinite Summer.
Author and fellow Edgewater resident Aleksandar Hemon on the Chicago locales that influenced his latest book.
"If you arrived late for Terminator Salvation and missed the name of the director, at what moment would you realize that you were not watching a Mike Leigh film?" Another great Anthony Lane movie review.
Cover Stories, writers and designers, an essay by Steven Heller. Via Design Observer.
"So, you're in love with one of your friends, but she has a boyfriend and probably wouldn't have sex with you anyway." One time only, easy solution.
Scott's touching haiku, submitted to our Deck Network Readership survey.
MS and I can't stop laughing at this.
"The people and the organizations that really flourish prize autonomy." Amen. A chat between two of our favorite people, Alissa Walker interviews Dan Pink.
"So you're sitting there with the engine screaming its head off, and your ears bleeding, and you're doing only 23mph because that's about the top speed, and you're thinking things can't get any worse, and then they do because you run over a small piece of grit." Really great review of the new Honda Insight.
KG weighs in on the Notre Dame/Obama controversy.
"Because it is used in every e-mail address and many tweets, you might be forgiven for thinking that the remarkably common symbol @, which English-speakers know as the 'at sign,' but Italians call a 'snail,' and south Slavs know as a 'monkey,' is a fairly recent invention."
The Reanimation Library is a small, independent library based in Brooklyn. It is a collection of books that have fallen out of mainstream circulation. Outdated and discarded, they have been culled from thrift stores, stoop sales, and throw-away piles across the country and given new life as resource material for artists, writers, and other cultural archeologists.
So that's it. A fascinating article in The Atlantic by Joshua Wolf Shenk on what makes us happy.
Excerpts from Marijuana Magazine's Special Issues. Via Your Monkey Called.
"A man, unexcited by his own possessions and increasingly confused as to why he collected all these things in the first place, decides to hire someone else to live amidst his books and clothes, DVDs and framed photographs..."
Read Dracula in real time. Via Neatorama.
Okay FS readers, today is Buy Indie Day and we here at CP are STRONGLY ( I can use all caps cause JC is in London and can't yell at me until like 6 hours from now) encouraging every one of our readers and their friends to go out and support your local independent bookstore. So go forth and purchase my friends. You might even win a prize for it. Email me at michele at coudal dot com and let me know where you made your purchase and we'll pick three random winners and send you a Field Tested Book and Poster.
FotA and Field-Tested Books contributor Randy "The Ethicist" Cohen has just started a new project for the NY Times where he offers his ethical analysis of the daily news: The Moral of the Story.
"The importance of Beck's rectilinear, topologic 1933 diagram is widely recognized and praised by graphic designers. Many wonder why Beck never extended his ideas outside London. The answer is, he did - to the nearest major subway network to London; Paris." Harry Beck: The Paris Connection. Via NotCot.
More info on this Friday's Buy Indie Day. Support your local independent bookstore!
So great, JJ Abrams on The Magic of Mystery.
Getting caught up with Jan Chipchase's Future Perfect. Always insightful and frequently surprising.
Related to the last, "There is no backspace on this thing." Ben's incredible play-by-play commentary from the Vit/Potts Layer Tennis Match a couple weeks ago.
Ben Greenman's novel Please Step Back is due out next week. We already admired the book's cover and now here's a story about a cover of a different sort. Swamp Dogg performs his own version of a song taken from the novel.
"But somehow, when Lindsay is just chatting with reporters, her lips spin silky verse like William Carlos Williams emceeing at Lawrence Ferlinghetti's birthday jam."
LiLoKu: The Rime of the Teenage Drama Queen. Brilliance, by our own KG for FSG.
"On a mundane morning in late summer in Paris, the impossible happened. The Mona Lisa vanished."
"All photos posted to the Free Verse project must include lines from a favorite poem written off the page in an unexpected or ephemeral way." Sweet.
William Gass, his books and what they mean to him, St. Louis 2007. Via Mefi.
Ebert sticks it to O'Reilly.
The Minister on the ambitious and beautiful St. John's Benedictine Abbey & University Bible Project.
"If he - I mean the judge, not King Oedipus - had said that he had lent the car to an Australian government secret agent whom he could not name without rendering him vulnerable to attack by terrorists, Marcus Einfeld might still be enjoying his place at the top of the heap, admired by all."
"As one researcher put it, being somewhat narcissistic is like driving a huge SUV: You're having a great time, even while you hog the road, suck up extra resources and put other drivers at higher risk." A Field Guide to Narcissism. Via Look At This.
"I've always figured the only way I could finish a book and get a plot was just to keep making it longer and longer until something happens--you know, until it finds its own plot." Terry Southern interview with Algren for The Paris Review in 1955.
Local note. Nelson Algren 100th Birthday at Steppenwolf tonight. See you there.
If Homer's Odyssey was written on Twitter.
TDRB flips through Stephen Bayley's Cars: Freedom, Style, Sex, Power, Motion, Colour, Everything.
Interesting brief interview with former editor Christina Kelly about Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love's cover feature in Sassy 17 years ago.
Great cover art for Ben Greenman's new novel Please Step Back due in May from Melville House. Ben recently did live commentary for us in a Layer Tennis match and blew pretty much everyone away.
TMN's favorite thing about the recession.
"They had lived with a bottle of Chianti between them, the scent hanging like a little purple veil between the roof and the million-candled carnival beyond --the window lights of the late office workers, piled one upon another above the river, the tavern lights that had bloomed like lilies touching each to each across the city's lawless deeps, the auto lights in one long forevering curve down miles and miles of boulevard where one dark driver after the other bore down the streets of the big night world..." Sweet Jesus, an unpublished Algren story in today's Reader, "'Entrapment."
The "Blog" of "Unnecessary" Quotation Marks. Via Adland.
"Did you know there's a secret daily flight from the United States to Cuba? Or, that in 1966, the U.S. government smashed a bacteria-laden light bulb inside the New York subway system?" Find out more in the Book of Secrets.
1001 rules for my unborn son. Nice, via Ainsley at Kottke.
Lunch read. My Manhattan Project. How Michael Osinski helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street.
Andrew and Rosecrans of TMN chat about the 2009 Tournament Of Books with All Things Considered. There's still time to lay down a bet.
Turns out it probably isn't wise to turn to Voltaire the next time you're saying something controversial, as he probably wouldn't defend to the death your right to say it after all.
"They didn't realise that nothing upstairs had been touched, this was how I worked, up to the elbows in papers, paints, maps, stones." A great personal essay by writer Iain Sinclair on living in the same house for 40 years. Via I Like.
John Hodgman judges today's second round match in the Tournament of Books. There's still time to place a bet and help us buy a truckload of new books for underprivileged kids.
The 50th Anniversary Edition of The Elements of Style. Mandatory for your reference library, this should be shelved right next to this. Via Daring Fireball.
If you enjoyed Ben Greenman's commentary for last Friday's Layer Tennis match, we highly recommend pre-ordering a copy of his upcoming new book Please Step Back. Also don't miss the book's theme song, recorded by funk legend Swamp Dogg (find it toward the bottom of the page).
The cancelled passport of Ezra Pound. Can't say I set out to find that but thanks to Maud I'm glad I did.
"This morning, I couldn't find my way into work. I drove the roads I thought would get me there but ended up on the edge of a barren field. The sky was dark." Today's Layer Tennis commentator Ben Greenman on that madness we hear so much about this time of year.
The Chicago Manual of Style questions and answers section is always worth a visit and it's edited by Carol Fisher Saller. Her new book is The Subversive Copy Editor. Cha-ching.
"He's an Irish lord and she's a long lost lady her parents thought died in a boating accident." Awesomest book discussion ever.
Stephen Hawking's bedtime stories.
Which Words Should Be Capitalized in a Headline? We're with Danny on this one.
The High Bouncing Lover.
Interesting composite interview a la Live from New York about women in comedy: "We'll Show You Who's Funny." Thanks Claire.
This has to be the headline of the day.
Related to the last. Rands on understanding your nerd which includes a handy section on "Advanced Nerd Tweakage."
"In retrospect, I'm sure he was asking if I had something I wanted him to autograph; there's no way that he was trying to "score" in front of a group of complete strangers." Funny story by FoTA (and eventual Grammy nominee) John Anderson about the day he sort of met Bob Dylan.
"I may be a thief and a liar," he says in beguiling Italian-accented French. "But I am going to tell you a true story." The Untold Story of the World's Biggest Diamond Heist.
"...she asked her husband if, instead of 'that chop suey you're writing,' he might not try 'sensible books that people can understand.'" On this day in 1923 JJ started FW.
The White House briefing room seating chart.
Vanity Fair's utterly fascinating look behind the scenes of the making of the movie The Godfather, The Godfather Wars
A huge collection of design books. Via Things.
Updike and Cheever on Cavett.
Revised Merit Badges by Rosecrans Baldwin.
A sneak peek at Madrid's 2016 Olympic bid book.
Big thanks to Nathan and the really nice folks over at Crush + Lovely for becoming a matching sponsor for the fifth annual Tournament of Books. Sponsors match up to $500.00 of wagers placed and it all goes to buy books for kids. Why don't you become a sponsor too? Just email me at michele at coudal dot com and get your name up on the list.
Traveling back more than 40,000 years to uncover the oldest English words. Via One Good Move.
"Learning to read is all about encountering words you don't understand. Unintelligibility in a text is a reason to form community." Junot Diaz, reading and answering questions in Seattle.
S/FJ describes who is on Twitter.
Snapshot revisited: The miner and the copper. So great.
My Ideas for Staged Photos Set Me Apart From Other Wedding Photographers.
Rick Poynor and Adrian Shaughnessy found it at the movies again.
"Silence and the inevitable don't really know." Clifford, by Jack Shedd. Bitter and sweet.
Chick in Kiev says, "Finally, a use for Twitter I fully endorse." (NSFW.)
Related. My very highest recommendation, Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire, the story of the 1949 Mann Gulch Fire and the story of a writer and scholar at the end of his life.
MS and DW's Australian fire photos resemble the descriptions in one of the most terrifying, exciting books I've ever read: Under a Flaming Sky: The Great Hinckley Firestorm of 1894. Also related: the Great Peshtigo Fire of 1871, America's largest natural disaster that few people have ever heard of (because Chicago happened to burn down that same night).
Our SD will show his short films at The Poetry Center's No Love For Love benefit tonight, along with Peter Sagal, Jonathan Messinger, and other friends of poetry.
On this day in 1926 Ernest Hemingway ended his contract with his first publisher through some creative double-dealing.
About Maud's Grandfather and a prostitute she once hid from him. Unrelated: About Maud and Dostoevsky.
Esquire magazine covers going all the way back to 1933.
Amongst the Most Expensive AbeBook's Sales for 2008, George Bernard Shaw's Typewriter at $7979. Via Things.
"Updike was congenitally unembarrassable and we are the beneficiaries of that." Amis on Updike.
Interesting story about FBI agent Keith Mularski, who spent three years working undercover with identity thieves.
After posting Pride and Prejudice and Zombies last week, I learned that this isn't the only remake of the book. There's also Pride and Promiscuity: The Lost Sex Scenes of Jane Austen.
ABR's 100 best first lines from novels.
"6. Depend Upon Your Own Personal Exertions." Even the chapter titles are inspiring. The Art of Money Getting or Golden Rules For Making Money by P.T. Barnum, 1880. Via Gilbert Lee.
What could turn out to be the greatest book of all time is set to publish in April: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, "features the original text of Jane Austen's beloved novel with all-new scenes of bone-crunching zombie action."
The seven greatest stories in the history of Esquire magazine, in full. Thanks, Chrys.
February 2 is Buy a Newspaper Day.
"While my great grandfather hid in a rain barrel, a Ukrainian villager raped my great grandmother. Some time later, my grandfather was born." Now that's a lede.
"Family Ties" by Z. So great.
Scenes from an Alternate Universe Where Saved by the Bell, Rather Than Law and Order, Became the Dominant Television Franchise for a Generation.
"You are not the only person in the world with high standards and refined taste. You are not the only consumer with foresight, charm and, if we may be so bold, lovely hair." Who cares how the chips taste, they had me with the copy. Real Chips.
FotA and Field-Tested Books contributor Lauren Groff has published her second book, Delicate Edible Birds, a short story collection, which was just released yesterday. Congrats, Lauren!
"KL: Old king learns too late that two of his kids only wanted power. He and most main characters die. One just gets his eyes gouged out." Shakespeare plays synopsized into 140 characters for Twitter.
Congrats to author Neil Gaiman on winning the prestigious Newbery Medal for his fantastic book The Graveyard Book. You can watch him read the entire book aloud here. And here is what he Twittered when he found out. Well said.
Rest in peace Mr. Updike.
The Printed Blog is available starting today in Chicago and San Francisco.
"One Woman's Confession: I Hate Suburbia," an essay from the September 1965 issue of Lady's Circle about life in the famous Levittown area of Long Island.
"Barkajak: noun; A person who yells answers to game show contestants on TV." Found a strange word? Look up the definition over at the Addictionary.
"The alphabet isn't dead; it just has a lot more company." Ellen Lupton on visual vs. verbal writing.
"Zombie Round" voting is open for The Morning News Tournament of Books. If your favorite book dies you don't want to think, "Damn, maybe I should have done something."
For KG. Walker Percy wrote a letter to The Boss. And The Boss wrote back. Nice.
Today's front pages from 73 countries.
Our copy (178/1000) of Things Our Friends Have Written on the Internet 2008 by Ben Terret and Russell Davies has just arrived and it's fab. We agree with everything Jason Kottke had to say about this project including that we wish we had thought of it first.
An example of when a columnist has writer's block and is up against a deadline: "CVS Receipts Are Too Long."
"The best thing about living in the White House would be running around like a maniac." Yet more student advice for the president-elect.
"There was a time when this newspaper - and many others across the south -- acted with gross neglect by largely ignoring the unfairness of segregated schools, buses, restaurants, washrooms, theaters and other public place." The Meridian Star apologizes. Amen. Via The Utne Reader.
Congrats to FoTA Charlie Newton, whose awesome, Chicago-set Calumet City has just received an Edgar nomination for Best First Novel.
Andrew Wyeth, Famed and Infamous Artist, Dies at 91. Kimmelman obit in the Times.
Consumed columnist and Buying In author Rob Walker is now doing free classroom "visits" via Skype.
The Chicago Crime Scenes Project, stories of what happened where and photos of what's there now.
In preparation for Tuesday, something to watch at lunch today. January 20, 1961.
Tips from Cory Doctorow on writing in the age of distraction. Thanks, Allan.
Illustrations by Edward Gorey, The Recently Deflowered Girl; The Right Thing to Say on Every Dubious Occasion.
"Dramatic changes in form require equally dramatic changes in terms." By Any Other Name from a working library. Via JSM.
Prepare your reading list for this year, the most anticipated books of 2009. Via TMN.
"I'll be putting on my skunk suit at other garden parties, now that I've been excessed from the Voice." Nat Hentoff gets the axe. Wow.
A really great read and fantastic images too when Selectism interviews the inventors of Freeman Transport bike.
Dallas Clayton's wonderfully illustrated children's book in its entirety: An Awesome Book! Via Transbuddha.
The rise of cell-phone novels in -- where else? -- Japan.
Fascinating article over at Wired, One Hacker's Audacious Plan to Rule the Black Market in Stolen Credit Cards.
'I now have over 2,500 songs on my iTunes at work, but they don't seem like they're mine so much as my computer's. And that somehow bothers me." How Dave Segal lost his vinyl. Via TMN.
To go along with JC's Apollo 8 post below, from today's NYT, Not-So-Lonely Planet.
sshhh! this is a working library. Mandy Brown rocks. Bookmarked.
So you'll know how to say "You can slide down my hunchback using your tongue as a brake" the next time you're in Austria: Weird Words and Bizarre Phrases. Via Arbroath.
"All of life is six to five against." On this day in '46 Damon Runyon's ashes were scattered over Broadway. Highly recommended, Jimmy Breslin's Damon Runyon: A Life.
Related to the last. An archive of Aspen issues and an ad for the magazine. "An unbound magazine in a box... the first truly new idea in publishing since paperbacks."
A look inside Marje Volezang's Eat Love, a book about her experiences as an "eating designer."
"Come in, but then go back out again." How Germans really see English ad slogans. Thanks Louis.
"Regulars are your friends-by-default, the ones you hope will recognize you in a dire emergency, when, say, you're choking on a four-dollar piece of Starbucks cheesecake and hoping your family won't remember you as 'the dead guy who paid too much for dessert.'" Rosecrans Baldwin is that guy over there with the yellow legal pads.
Three posts that I think should be required reading if you're looking for some context about the death of print (or how information is flowing today, and it's not from paper) 1. The Newspaper Industry and the Arrival of the Glaciers, 2. Content and Its Discontents, and 3. Change Happens.
"This is my statement. Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye." On this date in 1980.
From the July 1948 issue of the The Atlantic, Pearl Harbour in Retrospect.
"A friend once suggested I order a 'water on the rocks', and not realizing it was a joke I ordered it. The bartender stared at me with a confused look. I stared back with a red face." Oh. Via Design Crush.
20 signs you don't want that web design project. From Z who states, "all incidents taken from life."
So you know. Take all these "so you knows" with a grain of salt. Merlin's Real Advice Hurts.
When I was growing up, we were lucky to have a cabin in the woods. It was rustic, not fancy but a place to relax and come together as a family. Times have changed and cabins are not what they used to be.
There's at least 25 ways to blog, and to think I thought there was only one way.
"Instead, the amount of data generated will rise exponentially as we create a constantly expanding record of the present, swiftly overwhelming our memories of the past." Things.
Pop-up books from the 1930s.
Bookmarked, The Designer's Review of Books.
Finalists for The Literary Review's Annual Bad Sex in Fiction award. And congrats to the winner Rachel Johnson, you earned it.
Tangentially related to the last, commonly made suggestions about commonly made errors, and more importantly, non-errors, "those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English." Which is exactly the sort of attitude up with which I will not put.
So you know. That? Which? Or What? by Philip B. Corbett. Via ThoughtSpurs
"Or like the 'Thai style risotto,' a viscous gruel that's served with a clump of pork belly and intended, perhaps, for the Siamese twin of Oliver Twist." Really great restaurant review. Via MeFi.
Bram Meehan of Panel Press sent along a link to an interesting Mother Jones article that fits with our featured Laboratory Conditions film. Fear and Fallout in Los Alamos by Bill Donahue.
"Each month or so, we release a new issue of 'i left this here for you to read.- We then leave them in public places (such on park benches, on buses, in airports and dentists' offices...) for anyone to take--free of charge." From artist Tim Devin, i left this here for you to read.
Star Wars: A New Heap Or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Death Star. John Power's academic essay. Over the top? Sure. Fun? You betcha.
"I could not tell you the last time I heard 'O Canada' sung in public since I do not attend many hockey games." Kate Beaton on Canadian patriotism.
"It is, however, a sluttishness probably to be expected of someone who had to make a living after he discovered that the novels he reviewed were a lot better than the novels he wrote." -John Leonard. Via TMN.
FactCheck.org's coverage of Elliott Blaufuss's 2008 Halloween party.
Pentagram's redesign of the "luxury lifestyle magazine of the Harvard elite," 02138, was just about to go to press when the publisher pulled the plug. So they posted the entire issue online. The interface isn't too swell but the mag sure looks great. Thanks Kurt.
Read this. Via Gawker.
"On the morning of November 2, 1859 -Election Day- George Kyle, a merchant with the Baltimore firm of Dinsmore & Kyle, left his house with a bundle of ballots tucked under his arm. Kyle was a Democrat. As he neared the polls in the city's Fifteenth Ward, which was heavily dominated by the American Party, a ruffian tried to snatch his ballots." The New Yorker takes a look at How we used to vote. Via MeFi.
FoTA (and more significantly, FoST) Rick Kogan has written a beautiful tribute to Studs.
Joshua Green Allen's Fireland turns
thirteen years old today. We worship the guy (remember The House of Wigs?) and we carry on living just for updates to his Twitter feed and new journal Wiretap Follies.
Great moment in typos: Cambridge University's Parking Lot.
FotA John Hodgman's TED Talk. A quick, related local note: John will be at Second City tomorrow, along with another FotA and Field-Tester, Get Your War On's David Rees.
On George Lois and the big idea. Designed to Sell by Steven Heller from the NYTBR yesterday. Also, as a podcast.
"It may interest Dad to know that when Mom implemented the 'Sleeping in Separate Beds' initiative, on September 4, it was not, as she claimed at the time, because she suffers from restless-legs syndrome." Mom's And Dad's Campaign Statements, by Gregory Beyer.
Boring Books. Via 1+1=3.
William Carlos Williams is a really bad roommate.
David Barnett hunts down the best books that never existed. Via TMN.
Fair exchange.
Local note. Friend of the agency Scott Smith reads from his novel Like Dizzy Gillespie's Cheeks tonight at The Book Cellar in Lincoln Square.
"I wouldn't know what to do with a dollar even if I could remember which pants it was in." Nice story on E. B. White's "Hymn to the Barn," which was published on this date in 1952.
ADC profile of Robert Brownjohn.
So you know. It's Not Its.
Zulkey interviews David Rees of Get Your War On fame. For more Rees, don't miss his very funny Field-Tested Books entry on reading John Grisham.
Author Neil Gaiman is on tour for his latest book, The Graveyard Book. At each stop on the tour, he's filmed himself reading a chapter of the book and posted them online. You can watch the videos for each chapter here. Brilliant.
William Faulkner's "splendid failure," The Sound and the Fury was published on this day in 1929.
Chris Glass' notes to the future. Good stuff, we could all hold hands more and drink less soda.
Steven Heller and Lita Talarico's The Design Entrepreneur: Turning Graphic Design Into Goods That Sell, is a new book from SVA which includes a profile of CP. Thanks for that. Cha-ching.
Esquire's The 75 Books Every Man Should Read. "An unranked, incomplete, utterly biased list of the greatest works of literature ever published."
"I don't know. I didn't set out to do it. I just went up and made jokes, and people told me that I was an anxious, neurotic Jew. I didn't sit down and think, This is a good side of the street to work." NY Mag interview with Woody Allen.
The Guilfoile-Warner Papers are back at TMN and just in time I'd say.
"Now that there are no priests or philosophers left, artists are the most important people in the world. This is the only thing that interests me." Gordon Burn's smart overview of the career of Gerhard Richter. Mandatory.
Confused in the ways of love? Turn to the Mubai Mirror advice column. Ask the Sexpert, by Jil Wheeler.
As always, there's a fine line between "a contest" and "spec work," but this Penguin book cover design contest features some pretty impressive finalists.
The 50 Greatest Villains in Literature.
Artemy Lebedev's Mandership is published. Looks like it's only in Russian, but English speakers can find lots of common sense and uncommon opinions about design and creativity in the online archives.
Angela Landels' illustrations for a lovely series of paperbacks from Capuchin Classics.
So you know, 10 overused words in writing.
Rejected by 21 publishers and then greeted by lukewarm reviews, William Golding's first novel, The Lord of the Flies, was published on this day in 1954.
The classic Semaphore Wuthering Heights, via the Emily Bronte of History Comics
"The apocalyptic power of God has existed forever, and He's been restrained about using it, despite provocation. The apocalyptic power of science has existed only since 1945, and the A-bomb has been tried twice already." P. J. O'Rourke on God.
A diary for your whole life.
Steering Wheel. Paul Ford rules.
Embiggen your vocabulary with these totalistic cromulent words.
Very easy way to lose track of a couple of hours: Courthouse Confessions, Steven Hirsch's collection of photos and statements from people leaving NY courts.
FotA and Field-Tested Books contributor Ben Greenman's upcoming new book: Correspondences, which will serve as the starting point for The Postcard Project, wherein readers will help fill in blanks of the original book via postcards. How will that work? Ben will be at a reading tonight in NYC to explain it all.
So you know. Assuming you're not one of the lucky ones you might need this big list of hints for the apocalypse, including "Would You Save Your Family and Yourself, or Would You Die in the Flames?" and "How To be Invisible."
"The moment when one meets a book and knows, beyond shadow of doubt, that that book must be his - not necessarily now, but some time - is among the happiest excitements of the spirit." Christopher Morley's great essay "On Visiting Bookshops" from 1920. Via One Good Move.
Heinlein's fan mail solution, via Glass.
Trailer for an Erich Weiss/House Industries film about Ed Rondthaler, proponent of simplified American spelling. Charming.
The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot annotated via hypertext. Awesome.
Steven Heller on Paul Rand's can.
Funny graffiti from the abandoned Michael Reese Hospital makes good use of a morbid old quote often attributed to either Tom Waits or Woody Allen, regularly used on gravestones, and even the inspiration for this great book.
Oldie but so very much a goodie, 300 love letters.
Related again. Solid copy writing is important but it ain't the only thing. Ahem. Helmut Krone. The Book.
Related to the last. "But we'd rather be less efficient and better. Instead of just efficient and not as good." Everything you need to know about how to write advertising copy can be found in these vintage Doyle Dane Bernbach print ads for Karmann Ghia.
THE, a quarterly magazine from The Future Laboratory.
"Many have argued that the signs ought to read 'ten items or fewer' instead of 'ten items or less.'" Tesco in the UK bows to good grammar. Bravo.
Favorite Signatures: From Ginsberg to Sedaris, writers talk about their most treasured signed copies of books.
I think I just had my moment of becoming a real Chicagoan, complete with a new found chip on my shoulder, by getting upset at this article on adjusting to life in New York: "City Fits, Eventually, for New Arrivals."
"When my father died, the woods were thirsty from summer. If you were going to make a campfire, you would hunt and hunt for kindling that dry." On Ways of Dealing With Tripping in Public by Crispin Best. More greatness from Eyeshot
Wanna blow off the whole morning? Atari: The Golden Years by Steve Fulton. Via Waxy.
"Dark! All-encompassing, eternal darkness! Human eyes cannot penetrate the stygian blackness of this unholy confection!" Selections From H.P. Lovecraft's Brief Tenure as a Whitman's Sampler Copywriter.
The Book of Surfing, via It's Nice That.
300 Love letters.
Sex and the semicolon.
John Steffen field tests our Field Tested Books Book. Thanks for that.
Where Is Bob?, Tales of an Absentee Manager. I've been following this since it started last week. It's a perfect use of the weblog format to tell a serialized story. Great writing and funny too. Bookmark.
Why an Exciting Book is Just as Thrilling as a Hair-raising Movie.
Claire interviews David Pasquesi, star of Regrets: Hobbies and Spike's Factory (among countless other roles). We should mention that he's also a Field Tester.
"Mike Hummer had been a private detective so long he could remember Preparation A, his hair reminded everyone of a rat who'd bitten into an electrical cord, but he could still run faster than greased owl snot when he was on a bad guy's trail, and they said his friskings were a lot like getting a vasectomy at Sears." Winners have been chosen for the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest.
Socially and educationally, college really paid off for me, but I wholeheartedly agree with the WSJ, who says "For Most People, College Is a Waste of Time".
Dan Solomon asks, "Hey, you know who's still a douchebag?"
Fabulous, all 544 pages of Latin American Design from Taschen books is online.
"I try to explain how life is like discovering you've had the microwave set at defrost trying to make popcorn after three minutes of silence." Y Tu Yo Yo Ma Tambien by Jimmy Chen.
10 Oddest Travel Guides Ever Published. Not listed and perhaps not entirely related, but it reminded me of a favorite book: Round Ireland with a Fridge. Our Field-Tested Books Book would also serve as a fairly unique travel guide, too.
KG's piece from the Saturday Tribune on a new book by Simon Baatz about the Leopold and Loeb murders.
When politics was more clever and fun Dick Tuck's Hoaxes Against Nixon. Via Cynical-C.
Jody Rosen's "Dude, You Stole My Article," about a plagiarizing alt-weekly in Texas.
"The language is so lugubrious, like Edward Gorey or Lemony Snicket. Every tile has something, a name or a place or a word that places it firmly in the past." I Like's visit to Postman's Park to look at plaques commemorating people who died saving others. Each one feels like a Decemberists song waiting to happen.
The background on the How Magicians Control Your Mind study, and the full report itself from Nature Reviews Neuroscience magazine. A must read for any fans of magic and/or brains.
Our friends over at First Book, who we have had the pleasure of making donations to for every Field-Tested Books Book we've sold, have launched their own literary project: What Book Got You Hooked?
Now that you know what the Baader-Meinhof phenomenon is, you'll probably see some reference to it again later today.
Tangentially related to the last, a great story, Dear Monsieur Picasso.
"NBC News tried hard to find work for me, as a writer of radio newsbreaks, for example, but I wasn't very good at it. In the summer of 1958, they assigned me to the White House." Interesting, longish, personal NYer piece by Charles Van Doren with plenty of stories you didn't get in Quiz Show.
Admired yesterday at the bookstore, Goodnight Bush.
Interesting interview with designer Stefan Sagmeister. Thanks Jeff.
"Then the Child ventured forth from Israel and Palestine and stepped onto the shores of the Old Continent. In the land of Queen Angela of Merkel, vast multitudes gathered to hear his voice, and he preached to them at length." Funny piece of political satire by The Times' Gerard Baker.
Passages from the shortlisted selections for this year's Literary Review Bad Sex in Fiction Awards. Iain Hollingshead took home the top prize for his bewildering scene in Twentysomething. Here are some excerpts from previous years' winners.
"The country was bustling with construction, redevelopment, and euros. I stayed at the newly-restored Hotel Adlon, near the Brandenberg Gate pictured on the front of my $0.75 Dell paperback edition of le Carré..." Michael Bierut is a Field Tester and will be reading at our event in NYC Monday. Join us, won't you?
"Paul informs Lisa that he was having an affair and, for some reason, it's never brought up again. Lisa doesn't care. She's too focused on the murder charge." Fabulous reviews of Lifetime movies. Via TMN.
I Don't Have Time for Noncontroversial Art Exhibits.
Virginia Heffernan is "stumped by how to excerpt the language on message boards and blogs."
Great post by Rands, and tons of others, The Quirkbook. Mine is "Must quit all apps on Mac before leaving for the day."
"Arctic terns mate for life, unlike wives of zoology-department chairs..." Field Notes on the Arctic Tern, by Jon Methven.
Finalists for the David Foster Wallace Motivational Poster Competition.
Hail the Father of Symbol Signs, by Steven Heller.
In answer to Guest Editor Lincoln Cushing's post about %*!&@ Monday, Jonathan Hoefler says there's a word for that. That is %$@in' great.
I Was a Mad Man by William Drenttel.
A big congrats from everyone at the studio to former CP'er and Field-Tested Books founder, Dave Reidy, who just sold his first book, Captive Audience, which will be released next July by Ig Publishing.
Earlier this week, we complained about LG's improper use of an apostrophe in their Scarlet ads (TV's vs TVs). Then, this morning, we picked up a newspaper and saw that they have corrected the error. So once again, we find that our dedication to the maintaining the dignity of the English language for the good of humanity has paid off. You're welcome.
The Ghosts of My Friends is a book in which to capture inkblots created from the signatures of your friends.
"She never ruled out marriage, but her romances always seemed to end with flying vases and cab rides across town in an overcoat and nightgown to sleep at Frieda's or Violet's." How it turned out for the Peanuts gang. Completely brilliant. Via Waxy.
Here's what you were looking for late last night Sheila. Zadie Smith reading Frank O'Hara's Animals from our Verse By Voice feature.
Bothering us around the table at lunch for some time whenever we see yet another ad for it, so here's a quick note to LG: if you're going to spend millions on your massive Scarlet ad campaign, it's probably wise to proof your copy before the launch. It's TVs, not TV's.
"There's not a jewelry store in this nation that doesn't have a picture of Doris Payne in the back room with her gray-haired self." An interesting article on Doris Payne, elegant jewel thief.
"I have just finished setting up the whole of Mr. Eliot's poem with my own hands --you see how my hand trembles." Virginia Woolf, typesetter.
Playing Balderdash With Ex-Girlfriends by Michael Nelson Price.
"There was no tone of thankfulness for having been spared to answer to their names, but rather a toll, and an unvoiced wish that they, too, had been among the missing." 145 years ago today.
Paper Cuts on a new book about Han van Meegeren, "a mediocre Dutch painter but a brilliant forger who, in the 1930s and early 1940s, painted six 'Vermeers.'"
"I've spent years cultivating the art of writing the way I talk, and you can't really 'speak' a semicolon out loud. (Maybe John Gielgud could, but I can't.)" Terry Teachout responds to Paul Collin's Death of the Semicolon piece.
"I just read your intro—great stuff, really. I just have a few minor changes/corrections. No big thing."
A pair of books, reviewed in the NYRB, attempt to figure out how jokes work. And, more importantly, how one joke works.
A moving day for Mr. Zeldman. The thing about Z is that he makes great, personal writing seem so easy, damn him.
The education of former U.S. poet laureate Billy Collins via Warner Bros, cartoons. Really.
Lost in Emoticons, a girl and her Mom on IM. Fab. Especially Red Fish Face.
For Diane, here's what you're looking for. Our feature, Verse By Voice: Poetry After the Beep. Specifically, here's novelist Zadie Smith reading "Animals" by Frank O'Hara. Also, a new O'Hara collection has just been published and it was reviewed by William Logan in Sunday's NYTBR.
A great, lengthy interview from 1968 with Jean Shepard about The I, Libertine Hoax.
Ron Rosenbaum on catchphrases that should be thrown under the bus before they nuke the fridge.
"Words were not simply what they connoted: they were art objects and art supplies in themselves." Douglas Coupland on visual thinking. Via Daring Fireball.
"Lately I've had trouble underbaking my work. I think I need to work past the point where I think it's finished." Computer Arts interviews typographer and artist Marian Bantjes. Also check her "Click me. Read me. Open me. Buy me. Love me." print.
CP alum Kevin Guilfoile's Cast of Shadows is now available in Russian, with an awesome cover. "Театр Теней" means "Theater of Shadows," like this, or way better yet, this.
For those who tried to rock.
"Nauseating, perverted and vicious." Carrie Frye of About Last Night on the 60th anniversary of the publication of Shirley Jackson's The Lottery.
One Dead Media, an awesome elegy to edge-notched cards by Kevin Kelly. Via Big Contrarian.
The Sweet Smell of Sin.
An afternoon at The Portland Paper Show with Aaron.
"...true things gradually disappeared and shiny easy things took their place." On this day in 1961, Steinbeck's The Winter or Our Discontent was published.
Aleksandar Hemon's The Lazarus Project. All the words are from the novel. Some pictures are contemporary and some historical. Mesmerizing. Via Rob Walker, who's Buying In is highly recommended.
KG lying on the beach with his back burned rare.
Armin on Otl Aicher.
Denise Gonzales Crisp and Rick Poynor give us their thoughts on the new survey Graphic Design History: A Critical Guide.
A new letter from Paris from Rosecrans Baldwin has arrived. Also, check his field testing of The Boy Scout Handbook.
Radio Ephemera calls for entries. A Third Coast International Audio Festival contest in collaboration with the Prelinger Library. Get busy.
Vintage children's book from 1963: I Want to be a Coal Miner.
Carl Alviani interviews five creative professionals about their work days for Coroflot's Creative Seeds.
Two new DIY printing books (PIY?) at p+p.
Totally in the spirit of Field Tested Books, what Derek White read and where he read it.
Alissa wants to know who will field test the Field-Tested Books Book?
Kottke posts on print design by looking way, way back to Hypnerotomachia Poliphili.
Writers' rooms.
Take the Funny and Run by Larry Getlen.
So you know. The 220 dates on which the world will end.
"4 years and 200 days until the end of the world?" That'll give you just about enough time to read everything on this site.
"...the universe can wrap up a gift tidier than all the fictionalists in the world combined."
We Can Save Ourselves From Sinking. KG's latest at The Outfit.
Vanity Fair's great article on the history of the internet; How the Web Was Won.
Steven Heller burnishes his already excellent reputation by whipping out the Letratset in a time of crisis.
"On this day in 1964, T. S. Eliot wrote to Groucho Marx to confirm that a car would be at waiting at the Savoy to pick 'you and Mrs. Groucho' up for dinner."
Wonkette editor Ken Layne's column about the "angry" "half-literate" "morons" who comment on political sites, with 10 pages of comments proving his thesis. Awesome.
Something to think about from screenwriter Earl Pomerantz. "Numbers are your permanent companions, shadowing your life from 'Hello' to 'Goodbye...'
Today we learn about Canada. Jonathan Bell uncovers why Americans can so easily sniff out Canadians in their midst.
"In this version of the poem, each line is a hyperlink. Click on any line, then wait for the Apostrophe Engine to generate a new poem for you." Via Mefi.
The last ten tumultuous years in publishing as seen by The Observer's retiring literary editor Robert McCrum. A long, smart essay.
Words that sound true.
A designer must-read. Mr. Heller on German classicist O.H.W. Hadank.
Speak Up reports on the AIGA presentation by NY design collective Athletics which include some smart visuals on how they organize their business. We try to follow the "pretzel" too. Two of the presenters, Matt Owens and Jason Gnewikow, you might remember, played an epic match of Layer Tennis for us last fall.
Before and After #123: Ezra Pound. From the must-visit-frequently If Charlie Parker Was a Gunslinger, There'd Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.
Carolyn Kellogg of the LA Time's excellent book blog Jacket Copy is on a cross country road trip visiting literary landmarks and locations along the way.
Sometimes erotic, sometimes menacing and sometimes a little of both, Stephen Heller examines how one leg leads to another.
"Don't bite the hand that... looks dirty." Some proverbs, rewritten by first graders. Via Chris Glass.
Today's long read, Can a Dead Brand Live Again?
The Voice's favorite writers pick their favorite obscure books for summer. Via The BDR. Our Field-Tested Books compendium for 2008 debuts soon.
Increasingly opposed to the Vietnam War, Robert F. Kennedy struggled over whether he should challenge his party's incumbent president, Lyndon Johnson, in 1968. His younger brother, Teddy, was against it. His wife, Ethel, urged him on. Many feared he would be assassinated, like the older brother he mourned." An excerpt from Thurston Clarke's novel on Robert Kennedy, The Last Good Campaign.
Today's long read; Koolhaas, Constant and Dutch culture in the 1960's.
"Having had to write the book 'in a state of near drunkenness in order to deal with material that upset me very much,'" Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange was published on this day in 1962 .
Happiness, the book.
"...sophisticated classics with literature in easily digestible form." Literature Donor Kebab.
"There were the Russians, the Italians, even some Chinese. Together we formed a foul little congress: the United Tarnations, the Fellowship of the Smoke Ring." Sedaris on smoking. Am I the only one who hears his voice reading his work out loud as I read it?
FilmInFocus asked five leading architect/designers to tell them what five films have inspired their own creative growth and direction.
Great long read, The True Story of a Bogus Blog.
9-1/2 Questions With Kevin Cornell, Layer Tennis legend and Peoplemals overlord.
Here's GM's 1956 Design for Dreaming and here's Rob Walker's take on it and how the "new future" compares to the "old future."
"The book objects (...) are each made from pages of existing books removed from their bindings and rebound as one." Welcome to the Infinite Library
"Which probably proves that although memory may be short, a mile and a quarter can be a long, long way." The immortal Red Smith on the Derby, from 1979.
Typo hunt across America.
KG's latest over at The Collective, The Revolution Will Be Televised (But It Won't Be On Location).
Heartbreaking but a must read, The Things That Carried Him.
"Why did the boss give them $60,000 to produce a commercial for a product that didn't exist? Because that's how corporations work." Stick Out Your Tongue, from Z.
Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synsthesized LSD, passed away this week. Here's the complete text of his book,
LSD - My Problem Child. Via PCL.
"What follows 'so' is another idea, insight, or fact --not because it's merely next in a series but because it's conceptually consequent." So here's the thing...
Kid, you'll go far. Great first sentence of a college newspaper article.
On this day in 1926 Harper Lee was born in Monroeville, Alabama.
Author Nathaniel Rich is soliciting original cover art for the various editions of the novels of Constance Eakins, a fictional mid-20th Century force of literature in Rich's novel The Mayor's Tongue. Check out the complete and completely fictional list of Eakins titles, as well as a funny, pretend interview with him from The Paris Review.
Despite his deathbed wishes, Vladimir Nabokov's last work will not be burned. Here's some more on The Original of Laura.
Related to the last: here's the story I was trying to remember from This American Life about eating an Ortolan ("Act Two: Last Meal").
"I think advertising should be like poison gas. It should grip you by the throat, it should bowl you over, it should knock you on your ass." Adam Levy on George Lois.
"It is no secret that the real world in which the designer functions is not the world of art, but the world of buying and selling." Paul Rand on The Politics of Design..
"When I was on Nova I was the most arrogant person in the world. There was only one view of the world and that was mine." MagCulture interview with designer David Hillman, with lots about the highly influential 1970's British style magazine. Things To Look At has a selection of Nova covers.
"So, I make about as much money as our local garbage man; and I don't smell as bad after a day of work." Ambient musician Robert Rich on the 1000 True Fans idea. Via Waxy.
"One of the things I like about the story form is how much it can imply. Not as a kind of guessing game or some cute riddle you're playing on the reader, but in the way that situations in life imply other situations." An interview with Tobias Wolff about his new short story collection.
Creativity is not a commodity! Or is it? Adii from Cape Town adds to the discussion about the recent 37signals post about us. Thanks for that.
"Give us a nominee or give us death." KG and John Warner's latest political discussion, Running and Screaming.
"You will get screwed" and other sage advice from Kevin Cornell on entering illustration.
The Museum of Bad Art: Masterworks, the new book from the collectors of bad, featuring such classics as Bone-Juggling Dog in Hula Skirt and Retch Like an Egyptian.
"I'm told that you were probably never informed that I was anything other than 'missing in action.' That leaves me a lot of explaining to do." Steve Almond on the origins of Slaughterhouse Five.
WSJ vs NYT.
Joshua Allen's Two Minutes and 42 Seconds in Heaven at TMN.
Maciej Ceglowski goes dancing in San Telmo, Argentina and includes a helpful "partial list of tango mistakes I have made."
"Child Labor's Hidden Adorable Side"
"He didn't just invent the modern detective novel, he reinvented the first-person narrator. He has been imitated so often that many of the writers influenced by Chandler have never even read him." KG on Chandler for The Oufit.
Great interview with Junot Diaz, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, but maybe more impressively, also won the 2008 Rooster.
The hotel world's first Reader in Residence. Via Arbroath.
"2063 A.D. was a book published in 1963 by General Dynamics Astronautics. The book asked politicians, military commanders and scientists to speculate as to where humanity would be, a hundred years hence, in the great push towards space." Only 200 copies were produced but Paleo-Future offers a free pdf or a reprint of the book for purchase here.
"Sure, some may call me a stalker, but I prefer to think of myself as a stranger enthusiast." Three great print ads for Barska binoculars.
"It strikes me as one of those ideas that's so bad it's good." Fiction written by fictitious people.
"Ever since I was a little boy and saw the girl across the street reading One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish, I've known that I couldn't respect a woman with a taste for rhyme." Wonderfully funny response to Rachel Donadio's essay about books and romance in the NY Times.
A Jules Verne Centennial: 1905-2005 at the Smithsonian. Tons to explore, including this lovely title page from Robert the Conquerer, 1886.
Andy Baio's Waxy gets a bright redo.
Ian Fleming interviews Raymond Chandler for BBC Radio. Awesome.
Gene Weingarten's fantastic story, Pearls Before Breakfast, was one of a near-record six Washington Post Pulitzer-winners, just in case you missed it the last three times we posted it.
"People don't like it, writers are afraid of it, journalists certainly rarely use it. It's on the way out, and that's a shame." France and the Fate of the Semicolon. Via Andrew Sullivan.
Steve Ballmer's letter to Yahoo! reads like a Smoove B column.
Dean Allen's Textism returns. Alright.
"How did you know I was on Gmail?" "I am something of a genius, mom."
Postcards from Yo Momma. Via Torrez.
"Yeah no."
The new children's book Billy Goes Hunting, from the author of the forthcoming Billy's First Rifle. Via AdFreak.
Dinner with Henry Miller. a cantankerous old bastard if ever there was one. Via The Cartoonist.
"I'm the sculptor, I'm not a writer." The typo in the new Ernie Banks statue. Maybe all of this attention to missing apostrophes will finally get Walgreen[']s to fix their logo so I can put my longstanding hostility to rest.
Why we dig The Nonist. Subjectivity And The Subjugated.
Dick Cavett's advice to the presidential candidates: "I'd urge taking the mountain of money reportedly squandered on pizza, coffee and bagels and spending it more wisely -- on a talented young comedy writer."
Somehow I Was Tortured By the Pygmy Love Queen and Cheese Problems Solved were both beaten by If You Want Closure in Your Relationship, Start With Your Legs in the 30th annual Diagram Prize for the Oddest Book Title of the Year. Here's more info about each of the books shortlisted for the prize.
"A terrific modern noir on a raw Chicago cityscape harboring too many untold stories. If you try to set it down, this book will kick you in the teeth." -- Kevin Guilfoile, author of the Chicago Tribune bestseller Cast of Shadows. . KG is spot on. Read it on the plane last week and could not put it down until I was finished. Charlie Newton's debut novel, Calumet City.
"I made an agreement with myself long ago that I would never complain about anything as long as my books were in print, and they've stayed in print. You can't cut your suit of clothes to fit anybody else." Oldish but great Jonathan Miles interview with Jim Harrison.
"We're not rated X for nothin' baby!" Nick Haramis interviews illustrator and animator Ralph Bakshi who has plenty to say about Fritz, Crumb, art and money.
The Architecture of Self-Measurement by Geoff Manaugh. Lovely. My *** is Hopscotch or perhaps Crown Hall. What's yours?
Paola Antonelli and Benoit Mandelbrot, the curator and the mathematician. From Seed Magazine, totally unrelated to Seed, our series of conferences on design, entrepreneurship and inspiration.
"...a manifestation of the Bauhaus spirit, of this idea of shaping your environment through creativity, in a very direct way." An interview with Jenny Tondera of Experimental Jetset. And another longer one here. Via Design Observer.
Interesting read: The Next Slum? about the death of the American suburb.
Finally, someone getting to the bottom of a question I've had for a while now: Why Won't Phone Books Die?
A two-part Hear Hear interview with art director Paul Buckley who has just won a Design Museum Brit Award for his Penguin Classics Deluxe Editions.
"Goofing off as bonafide professional development." Well said Josh.
A letter from our man in Paris.
A full scan of The Usborne Book of the Future, published in 1979. Via That's How.
Round 2 gets off to a rollicking start in the Tournament of Books with the favorite advancing. Make sure to read KG and John Warner's From the Booth too. Damn, I love this tournament. And get your bets for charity in please, we have 5000 in our sights.
Matt Soar on cultivating and embracing failure (a subject close to our hearts) and in doing so, keeping yourself open to happy accidents.
Best news ever: after killing off the site in 2004, The Plug has returned. Thanks to Torrez for making my day.
"We are your journal of meat culture." This link coming to you from someone who rarely eats the stuff.
"Process is an antidote to working with stupid people." Tolva on a comment from Paul Hammond of Flickr.
Chelsea Holden Baker of Frog Design ties together three SXSW panels in three synthesizing steps, plus a bonus, for Cnet. Thanks for that.
Every $10 you wager in Making Book 2008 buys four new books for underprivileged kids. With generous matching donations from organizations like MetaFilter we've raised enough to buy 4952 already. But we're just getting started, ante up willya?
On this day in 1939 the novel originally titled L'Affaire Lettuceberg was published.
Our pal Mike RoHDe was in Austin for SXSW Interactive and lucky for all of us he made a big set of sketchnotes.
A long list of Onomastic Sobriquets in the Food and Beverage Industry, like The Dew Drop Inn and The Wholly Mackerel.
"Don't ever tell anybody anything. If you do, you start missing everybody." Among Best Last Lines from Novels.
"We were riding along and listening to NPR. I felt my facial muscles tightening, and the words beginning to form in my mind: Shut the f*@k up." David Mamet's "Why I Am No Longer a 'Brain-Dead Liberal'." There's nothing quite as wonderful as a Mamet essay.
Match Four from this year's TMN Tournament of Books is complete. I won't spoil it but if you backed the loser in our Making Book project you can always make another bet. Really you should, we've raised enough money to buy 4504 books for underprivileged kids but we're just getting started.
"There must be something wrong with us, I remember thinking. Where is the joy of youth, the carefree spirit of eternal promise? Is there something inherently depressing about our family? Then I discovered we were not alone. I discovered bershon." -Michael Bierut.
This is Fly, a fly fishing magazine for hipsters. Via That's How.
Match Two from this year's TMN Tournament of Books is complete. I won't spoil it but if you backed the loser in our Making Book project you can always make another bet. Really you should, we've raised enough money to buy 4072 books for underprivileged kids but we're just getting started.
Fantastic, 50 years of Form: The Making of Design magazine, scanned for your perusal.
It was a long lunch today, so here was another topic: the story of Floyd Collins, the cave explorer who was trapped for fourteen days in Kentucky's Crystal Cave. Trapped!: The Story of Floyd Collins is the book that scared the living daylights out of my 8th grade self.
Zulkey interviews Jad Abumrad, one of the hosts of Radio Lab, the best show ever on radio.
Simply way too many cool books over at Viction:ary.
"Our area of expertise has become smaller, and there are many things that we ourselves don't know about the things we are making. That is unhealthy in a way." Illustrated PingMag interview with Living World.
"In an era obsessed with blockbuster debuts, glamour-shot wonders, it's easy to forget great talent doesn't always arrive by forklift." A Lighter Shade of Updike. Via One Good Move.
Every $10 you wager in Making Book 2008 buys four new books for kids. Plus, when you add in the generous matching donations from organizations like Iconfactory, your ten bucks has the power to buy 36 books. Ahem.
Finally, I can lose weight without listening to Republica.
The Wall that Lou Dorfsman Built, by Jim Schachterle.
"Rock of Pages, 45 books for the literate music fan." A great list.
Beside wagering and helping us buy books for kids, you can now start your official office pool. The 2008 TMN Tournament of Books Brackets (pdf) have been released.
"A superhero's costume is constructed not of fabric, foam rubber, or adamantium but of halftone dots, Pantone color values, inked containment lines, and all the cartoonist's sleight of hand." Secret Skin, an essay in unitard theory by Michael Chabon.
Every $10 you wager in Making Book 2008 buys four new books for kids. Plus, when you add in the generous matching donations from organizations like Emma, who just joined up, your ten bucks has the power to buy 32 36 books. Ahem.
Idiom Shortage Leaves Nation All Sewed Up In Horse Pies.
Newborn: In More Ways Than One, a guest editorial at Speak Up by Valon Sopaj who was part of the team of artists behind the iconic sculpture in the center of Kosovo independence. A must-read.
Every $10 you wager in Making Book 2008 buys four new books for kids. Plus, when you add in the generous matching donations from organizations like Daring Fireball, your ten bucks has the power to buy 32 books. Ahem.
"The news that the train operating company called 'one' was changing its name to National Express East Anglia was greeted with relief in the railway press." A piece on branding by Andrew Martin, with implications that go beyond railways.
"I recommend Rick Stoeckel for admission to your university due to his strong academic caliber. As his mother, I am proud to say that, out of his homeschool class, Ricky finished as valedictorian."
"What kind of heartless bastard says 'no' to that?" Baby Got Books.
Nick Hornby, Ze Frank and Gary Shteyngart are just three of the judges announced for this year's TMN Tournament of Books. Perhaps this news is just the thing you were waiting for to help us buy books for kids by gambling on who will win The Rooster?
Sound betting advice for wagering on the TMN 2008 Tournament of Books from the Commissioner, Kevin Guilfoile. Lay down your ten bucks at Making Book and help us buy a boxcar full of books for underprivileged kids.
Andrew Huff visited American Science and Surplus and brought his camera too. The store is a fave in my house and makes for a great afternoon when matched up with lunch nearby.
"Who are these people and what do they do? Bloody hell if I know. But what I can find is pretty awesome." the Rhetoric Wizard finds us by accident.
150 Geeky limericks. Via Waxy.
Our office mates at 37signals aren't as tough as this article in Wired makes them out to be. But wotthehell, it's great pub regardless.
Found on the way to something else. Horse Racing Glossary, terminology, jargon and slang.
Large collection of the American Library Association's Celebrity READ Posters.
The Common Law Origins Of The Infield Fly Rule. Because, I feel like I haven't contributed enough to Fresh Signals from law school.
Jonathan Donner's
The Rules of Beeping, exchanging messages via intentional "missed calls" on mobile phones. Via Future Perfect.
"On a Wednesday afternoon last August. the beast of technology came slouching down Highway 68 through the heart of Yellow Springs, a small college town in southwest Ohio, and carried away a bit of what made Yellow Springs a little different from other places. There was no blood spilled, only ink. The Yellow Springs News went offset." The rest of the piece is as good as the lede. Clipped from Quipped.
So, you sweat to make a film and carefully plan how you want to promote and distribute it and then somebody you don't even know decides is should be available free. As a general rule of thumb, if it's labeled as a "New Paradigm," you can be sure it's BS.
Why Good Ad Copy Works from a neurological perspective. Via Andy Rutledge.
For BB, because he'll freak out and we'll get no work out of him today, UK punk and post-punk fanzines 1980-1986. Sorry CampBoy.
"Quiet down, everyone. This princess isn't going to save herself, you know." Todd Levin is The Most Competitive Man Alive, at TMN.
Relink. Frequently asked questions from the team at Oxford Dictionaries. Also, Commonly made suggestions about commonly made errors, and more importantly, non-errors, "those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English." Which is exactly the sort of attitude up with which I will not put.
Page 75 defined.
"Frozen pizza... cut from trees." Grain Edit interviews Wink Design from the Twin Cities.
If you pre-order it and it doesn't happen, do they still have to write it? 19-0: The Historic Championship Season of New England's Unbeatable Patriots.
Don't really feel like you got the education you wanted? No fear, all you need is An Incomplete Education to fill in the gaps.
Some memorable new words from the past few years.
Wasn't I just saying the other day that Steve Albini is as good a writer as he is a musician and sound engineer? 37 Signals agrees.
Please Spool to End of Tape Before Playing Other Side.
A letter from Paris. Bonne Année, by Rosecrans Baldwin.
"One author writes a story, and others post branches to it in different directions. The result is an organic, evolving story where everyone can participate." Interactive fiction writing over at Protagonize. Via MeFi.
"Fred Thompson is running for president with the enthusiasm of a nine-year-old shopping for Sunday pants."
The Huckaboom and the Obamawagon. KG and John Warner are wearing their pundit hats again for TMN. Yay.
How to Read The New Yorker in 10 Easy Steps.
Recommended from my Mexican vacation reading stack. Jim Harrison's Returning to Earth, V. S. Naipaul's A Bend in the River, Graham Greene's The Heart of the Matter and my book for the next Field-Tested reading list, Greene's The Power and the Glory.
"...given the quick and dirty nature of Layer Tennis, the pieces should not be about creating perfect things at the drop of a hat (lord knows it takes me forever to come up with something cool) but to come up with a process that talked about the tools we use everyday, and at the same time have fun with them in a manner that client work rarely allows." Matt Owens on playing Layer Tennis. Here's his match against Jason Gnewikow. Live matches restart in January.
2007 was a banner year for media errors and corrections, make sure to check the "Apology of the Year."
Best Daring Fireball headline ever and a pretty darn good story to go with it.
Matthew makes a wreath.
"Surprisingly interesting." "An unlikely delight." Book Ads from the NYTBR, 1962-73.
Scott Aaronson's claim that "Australian actresses are plagiarizing my quantum mechanics lecture to sell printers" is now resolved. Via Mefi.
Love, sex and robots.
So you know. Nominations for the TMN 2008 Tournament of Books close Friday.
As if they weren't cool enough already, Andrew Blauvelt and Rick Poyner are joining our friends at Design Observer as contributing writers.
Recommended by a viewer of our Laboratory Conditions documentary: Jennet Conant's book 109 East Palace, about the first families who arrived in Los Alamos to build the bomb.
The House of Wigs is why we had to have Joshua Allen do commentary for a Layer Tennis match. For God's sake, click on the little arrows that mean "more." See you in a couple hours.
"To tell you the truth, one day I had four landslides." The World's Most Dangerous Bookstore.
"Single words are not enough, however. Ideally, there could be a set of pre-written sentences that I could simply cut and paste into short reviews. These sentences might look something like the list below." Via TMN.
"All I started out to do was show up my brothers. I didn't have to go this far." On this day in 1976, Saul Bellow delivered his speech in acceptance of the Nobel Prize.
"Anyone can easily tell where is up and where is down. And most would agree that forward faces right while back looks left... Let us join together these four directions adding their vector sums to form a scheme with 8 directional rays." Artemy Lebedev's Emotion Matrix.
"...a full account - one that takes in the downsides and the incoherencies and failures - is always more interesting, as well as truer, than a story that looks just at the high sunlit pastures." Penguins Lose the Plot by Robin Kinross.
Looks like, with Laboratory Conditions, we kicked off some renewed interest: Wired visits the Black Hole. Thanks John!
"Don't worry about people stealing your design work. Worry about the day they stop."
My first issue of GOOD Magazine arrived last week, it's a great read, and a subscription costs only $20, 100% of which is donated to a charity of your choice.
In defense of 'irregardless,' the baddest-ass word of all time. Via Veer.
"It is permissible to define a category as a string of terms. For example, we might class Madame Bovary and Dress For Success under the heading of Clothing & Desire." From the Cataloguing Rules of The Interstitial Library.
An Open Letter to a Guy I Work With Who Always Comes Into My Office to Tell Me He Sent Me an E-mail Right After He Sends Me an E-mail. Lots more open letters. Via the recently halted Your Daily Awesome.
Jaime's illustrated essay on Minotaure (1933-39) which featured "contributors who, from the editors to the essayists to the artists, went on to storm the hallowed annals of history."
Required reading. Norman Maclean's Young Men and Fire. And while you're at it, the University of Chicago's edition of Maclean's A River Runs Through It, with wood engravings by Barry Moser needs to be on your shelf too.
The NYT launches it's very own blog about hockey, Slapshot.
Zulkey interviews Anne Elizabeth Moore, author and former Punk Planet publisher.
Joseph at The Book Design Review gives us his favorite book covers of 2007. This one is my fave.
John Gruber sends us this quote, regarding today's Laboratory Conditions episode. "It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it." –Upton Sinclair.
The story of the Untergunther, the "illegal restorers" who broke into the Pantheon to repair a clock.
Related to the last, check out Verse By Voice where we asked people to call in and read us their favorite poems. Here's author Zadie Smith reading Frank O'Hara's Animals.
Derek and Co, get caught red-handed and head back in The Fray, which relaunches as a quarterly. Sweet.
Related to the last. Milk Eggs Vodka.
"She knew what she wanted- a man to take her away from the dirt road and one-room shack she called home." Vintage hillbilly romance novel covers.
From the Oxford University Press, Very Short Introductions to "almost everything." Via Mefi.
Children's Letters to George W. Bush.
The Future of Reading (A Play in Six Acts) by Mark Pilgrim. Via John Gruber.
Zulkey interviews Peter Sagal of Wait, Wait Don't Tell Me!.
KG on novelist Ira Levin at The Morning News.
"Perhaps you'd like two more chairs to contain your giant intellect." Dick Cavett on the Mailer/Vidal fight on his show in 1971.
"Archy writes without punctuation because he is forced to use his head to butt the keys of the typewriter one at a time, and he is not able to reach the shift keys of the machine in order to make punctuation marks or capital letters."
On this day in 1851, Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published and was "so belittled and slandered in the crucial first weeks following publication in America that it never had a chance."
NYT correction of the moment. "Two picture captions with an article last Sunday about fall art auctions were reversed."
"A story is not a movie is not a TV show, and I can't tell you the number of student stories I read where I see a camera panning." Show, Don't Tell: The Great Lie of Writing Workshops. Via One Good Move.
Veerle interviewed Scott Hansen of ISO50 last week, before his Layer Tennis match (see image above) against Rob Cordiner.
"The quintessential mark." David Barringer on "X" for AIGA. Via Design Observer.
Really great story about a new D.B. Cooper suspect from New York magazine.
"One part of the menu, described as Divo Specials, lists dishes which 'were traditionally served to visiting dignitaries and the nobility of the Ukraine'. I can only assume Ukrainians have a healthy disdain for their dignitaries." This restaurant review from the Guardian only gets worse from there. Via Defective Yeti.
"...technology's changing so much, it would be as if a painter learned to paint with only a limited set of colors. Then every year there were more colors..." From a Designboom interview with video artist Bill Viola.
Required reading. AIGA Interview with John Berg, art director of Columbia/CBS Records from 1961-85. Via DO.
"(36) She stands on the unpaved road with your newborn son on her breast. Even though she can't hear you over the sound of the helicopter, you're screaming the words. Six months and you'll send for her. You promise." Paul Ford on how to say "I love you," in precisely 100 different ways.
"So, yes, beauty matters. Boy, does it matter. It is not surface, it is not an extra, it is the thing itself..." A new column in The Guardian, Welcome To Dork Talk, by Stephen Fry. Bookmarked.
For BB, whose storied legacy includes a stint at Rock Products (competitor to Pit & Quarry): AdAge's picks for magazines below their A List, including Garden & Gun and Quality Number Fill-Ins Magazine.
Inspired by recent news from the West, I'm rereading an all-time favorite, Norman Maclean's account of the Mann Gulch Fire in 1949 Montana, Young Men and Fire. Highly recommended.
Jason Kottke on the final installment of Errol Morris' brilliant, enthralling investigation of Roger Fenton's Crimean War photographs for the NYT. Make time to study the whole series, starting at the beginning. Do.
On this day in 1958, Raymond Chandler began his last novel, the never-completed Poodle Springs.
After five great, great years, Mister Aitch is saying goodnight from Giornale Nuovo. No, thank you Stuart.
Every novel on Man Booker Prize shortlist to soon be available as free downloads.
Morning Becomes a Letter. From the archives.
Once in a while we have to go back and read this, the greatest blog post of all time from the anonymous, abandoned House of Wigs.
Many congrats to FotA, Claire Zulkey, for selling her first book today.
Relink but worth it. Space Alphabet by Irene Zacks, illustrated by Peter P. Plasencia, 1964.
NYC to Santa Monica by car in 32 hours and 7 minutes. Via Daring Fireball.
People who like this sort of thing will find it exactly the sort of thing they like. Illustrated collector's notes on editions and cover art for various George Orwell books from the library at Brown.
The Tao of Deadlines.
In Search of Lost Vanguards, Excavation and Space Exploration in Constructivist Architecture. Great essay. Via Mr Gibson.
"We become a nation of navel-gazing dreamy-eyed so-called creatives who no longer consider it worthwhile to roll up their sleeves and get down to hard work to get a job done, or, even worse, who no longer deem it worth their time to bother checking out any of the stuff that anyone else has made." Michael Fallon's How Creativity Is Killing the Culture.
Advice: Do not read Daniel James Brown's book Under a Flaming Sky about the Hinkley, Minnesota firestorm of 1894 before going to sleep. It's an incredible story and a wonderful book, but it's pretty gruesome.
"The grand title editorial designer, which I sometimes use, is a slight provocation. I am not a graphic designer, and don't aim to become one, but as a design critic and editor, I have come to regard the craft of designing as essentially the craft of organizing meaningful structure." -Max Bruinsma. Lots of good reading here. Via ManyStuff.
"R is for rockets, ready to go." Via p+p.
Passages from the soundtrack album from a really obscure 1960's film adaptation of Finnegans Wake.
Architectural Representations of the City in Science Fiction Cinema. Found among other
KG is the Non-Expert at TMN today and somebody's band needs a drummer.
"...recognizing that vividly colored bindings of the modern book can be utilized effectively as a positive decorating asset." Steven Heller, Decorative Books: The End of Print.
"All my novels have been written on this desk, and old papers of every kind have accumulated like a great reef." Photos of Writers' Rooms from the Guardian. Via Zach Klein.
30,000 Years of Art. Via Cool Hunting.
On this day in 1957 West Side Story opened on Broadway. The musical's plot had been told many times and in many ways long before that.
"He does not have to give the 'V' sign back unless it feels natural to him. However, he must acknowledge them so that he does not appear to be aloof or rude." Verizon's style book for deploying "Can You Hear Me Now" guy. Via Ad Land.
"Carrying a book around in L.A is a good way to invite stares of disbelief from rubberneckers liable to view you as a strange emissary from a more literate planet..." Nathan Rabin is a Field Tester.
Kottke on perhaps the first NYT restaurant review, from 1859.
It's always nice when you find something you thought had been lost forever.
For former smokers who long for the feel of the cigarette box and a good read.
Sure signs that it's Fall: Honeycrisp apples are now available and this year's edition of The Best American Crime Reporting anthology has just been released. Both are fantastic.
A Nonist classic, Boom Computing, beauty and horror in "circular slide rules manufactured to calculate various effects and time lengths of a post nuclear landscape." Sublime.
Khoi's investigation into elevator theory and practice is more interesting than it sounds. Really it is.
John Warner launches TOW Books, "funny books for people with good senses of humor."
Retronym, a term consisting of a noun and a modifier that specifies the original meaning of the noun.
The Daily Show and Philosophy: Moments of Zen in the Art of Fake News, a new book wherein seventeen philosophers take a look at the show. Via One Good Move.
Comprehensive resource and annotations for an all-time CP fave, Mikhail Bulgakov's Master and Margarita. Also, the trailer from the Russian mini-series production.
Speaking of The Nonist, here's a needed relink to Red Hot Library Smut.
"I figured that anyone who dies at the young age of twenty-two deserves to be remembered, even if by complete strangers." Greg attends a real funeral in a virtual place.
"I'm not comfortable participating, but I'll watch." This and dozens of other truly useful phrases translated for globetrotting.
FotA and Field Tested Books contributor, Scott Korb, has a new book out: The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God.
FotA (Friend of the Agency) Dan Pink addresses emotion and empathy in public signs in a video created to accompany his piece for Wired, Pecha Kucha: Get to the PowerPoint in 20 Slides, Then Sit the Hell Down.
"I bragged that I had an amazing client who gave me complete creative freedom. He looked at my work and said, 'Sometimes complete creative freedom is not a good thing.'" Debbie Millman interviews James Victore, excerpted from her upcoming book How To Think Like A Great Graphic Designer.
"On this day in 1607, Shakespeare's Hamlet was performed on board the merchant ship, 'Red Dragon,' anchored off the coast of Sierra Leone."
Print is dead. Long live print?
7.
For everyone at dinner tonight: Walter Benjamin's The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.
That Was in The New Yorker?!. Via One Good Move.
DF says this is the worst product name ever, but it's not even the worst product name of the year.
"Even people I know who self-identify as urban explorers aren't at all that interested in undergrounding - especially not in storm drains. A lot of them just don't see the actual interest." Bldblog interview with writer, photographer, and urban explorer Michael Cook.
Halftones.
The origins of prison tap code. Fascinating. Via The Nonist.
There is a new round of Matthew Baldwin's Cliche Rotation Project going on. Submit yours today.
Following up on DW's earlier post: isn't The World Without Us just a less angsty version of Douglas Coupland's Girlfriend in a Coma? Same basic "the earth becomes a wasteland when people disappear" idea.
The World Without Us.
"Rick asked me if I wanted to stop in for a quick drink. Later on, he told me the proposition was a test to see if I was the kind of girl who would drink at the Billy Goat at two in the afternoon.
Turns out, I'm that kind of girl." Karen Abbott, author of the terrific Sin in the Second City, owes FotA Rick Kogan a trip to Atlanta.
"It sits as lightly on a heavy meal as it does on your conscience," and other retired ad slogans. Curiously missing, a fave for Continental Airlines, "The proud bird with the golden tail."
"All you have to do is write one true sentence." On this date in 1923, Ernest Hemingway published his first book.
Winners of this year's Bulwer Lytton Fiction Contest. If you're unfamiliar: "The goal of the contest is childishly simple: entrants are challenged to submit bad opening sentences to imaginary novels." Via Cynical C.
Really great audio interview with Rob Walker, writer of the NYT's Consumed column. Rob gave us a very nice writeup about our
Swap Meat. Via Core 77.
Award winning writer Alex Kotlowitz takes a look at the immigration (or is it assimilation?) debate by focusing on one small town here in Illinois, Carpentersville.
"…while I'd like to tell you that I've returned with tales of some great adventure, I'm actually just here to scribble about this one book that has illustrations of someone taking a s**t on nearly every page: "The #2 Bestseller of 1992.
"The bloguor does not have the impression to sell his heart with the devil because it chooses publicities in connection with its contents and those do not attack the visitor." Regarding The Deck, Biologeek gets it. [translate]
"Wasn't he my earliest image of what it was to be an artist? He was very humble, I think to myself, and spoke savagely of his own work. I've always admired that, I think to myself, as if by so doing he pushes his own films away from him and lets them become something else. As though his loathing, his apparent indifference, frees them." Spurious on Bergman.
We would rather have revealed this in our own way, on our own terms, but I suppose it's inevitable that the truth come out. More background here.
"Adam and Eve on a raft. Wreck 'em." Nice resource on Diner Slang. Found along with a lot of other language and word resources at the Internet Eclectic.
Vincent to Theo November, 1883. "And my aim in my life is to make pictures and drawings, as many and as well as I can; then, at the end of my life, I hope to pass away, looking back with love and tender regret, and thinking, 'Oh, the pictures I might have made!'" Seven years later, on today's date in 1890, Van Gogh shot himself in a wheat field.
So you know. How screenwriters get paid. Via John August.
Related to the last, my favorite Vonnegut novel is The Sirens of Titan, although I much prefer the older paperback covers
"Their task is to explode a stellar bomb, 'with a mass equivalent to Manhattan island,' on the surface of the sun. The effect will be, we are told, 'to create a star within a star,' a plan that has not succeeded since the union of Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland." Anthony Lane on Sunshine.
The history of the American supermarket. Groceteria.
Posting this '91 vid for the KLF's 3am Eternal as an excuse to repost The Manual in which the justified ancients of Mu Mu reveal their "zenarchistic method used in making the impossible happen." Comprehensive, hilarious and pretty close to the truth I imagine.
Over at TMN, Rosecrans sends another letter from the City of Lights.
Paul Theroux said, "Tourists don't know where they've been, travelers don't know where they're going." 72° Executive Producer and occasional co-conspirator John Tolva definitely falls into the "travelers" category. He's just posted his account of a trip to Barile, Italy that began with an e-mail out of the blue.
Fascinating article on the dissapearance of Microsoft researcher Jim Gray
and the extraordinary effort to locate him.
"How Internet jokes helped a Japanese ad mascot make its way into American malls." Rob Walker on Domo, for Consumed in the NYT Mag.
"To make life interesting. To make the world better. To, well, to keep us alive." Please Never Find A Giant Squid, from the SF Gate.
Nice Herald Magazine profile of Anne Ward, proprietor of one of our fave blogs anywhere, I Like.
"Variables won't; constants aren't." Osborn's Law and many other eponymous laws of software development. Via Boing.
"And she started crying. It's never fun to have somebody cry, but it wasn't like I punched her or anything." Zina Saunders interviews Steven Heller. Via xBlog.
"Let me say that again: The solution to our warning woes is undo." Smart A List Apart article by Aza Raskin.
"What does it all mean? Maybe we're happy with living in simulation. Those people who 'buy the download to listen to, but ... get the vinyl to own' are clinging to the last few bits and pieces that are no longer bits and bytes." Insightful post at Things Magazine.
The LA Times' crime reporter Jill Leovy's Homicide Blog. Morbid, for sure, but very interesting.
On this day in 1951 The Catcher in the Rye was published in the Quixotian dust-jacket designed by Michael Mitchell
"Dear internet from 2001: How's it going? I miss you." Via Byrdhouse.
Ian Brown does some Field Testing of his own: reading The Black Box: All-New Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of In-flight Accidents on a plane. Can't imagine how unpleasant that must be.
"Every drop of fresh apple juice, carefully pressed from the reddest apples, shining in colors of the cheeks of a snow-country child, is yours to enjoy in each soft and juicy Kasugai Apple Gummy." Now that's copy.
I don't know from Harry Potter (other than watching the brilliant Wizard People, Dear Reader), but even I found this touching, so it'll likely be particularly effective for MS and BB: Stephen King on the final Harry Potter book.
Penguin Classics reissues Boys Own Books. Lovely series design.
"I think the superficial parts about geekdom are being appropriated by the mainstream, but I don't see any hipsters here in the East Village who are running out to learn how to code in Ruby on Rails just to pick up chicks." Zulkey interviews Anil Dash.
Michelangelo Antonioni's essay The Soundtrack for a Film Set in New York Circa 1970, with an introduction by CP hero Walter Murch, at BldgBlog. Great.
What code doesn't do in real life that it does in the movies.
Wound up having too many beers last night talking to John Sellers, author of Perfect from Now On: How Indie Rock Saved My Life, which is, in part, about drinking too many beers with Robert Pollard. So maybe it was appropriate after all.
If Charlie Parker was a gunslinger, there'd be a whole lot of dead copycats. Scroll this on a regular basis.
John Greenberg on our Swap Meat and Art for Art's Sake.
Following up on that last post: don't miss the the Amazon reviews for Latawnya, the Naughty Horse.
Posted without comment: Latawanya, the Naughty Horse, Learns to Say "No" to Drugs. Thanks Claire.
On this day in 1928 James had dinner with Scott. I'm not sure if this was before or after he played pitch 'n' putt golf with Sam.
"...in running the day-to-day racket of 'making stuff for good people' I just try to take gigs that I'll be proud of in the end." Hear Hear interview with the Draplin Design Co. Disclaimer, the DDC and CP are frequent co-conspirators.
"An elderly ironist has had the time to watch enough cultural flotsam go by that he can no longer pretend that one instance of human productivity is intrinsically much more ridiculous than any other...he knows what to expect from the world, and so expects nothing more." Fantastic essay from 3 Quarks Daily: Hipsters, Prepare to Die. Via One Good Move.
Kev asks are you a hummingbirds or a woodpecker?
"As data, 'maybe' is as useless as a three-star rating in a five-star system." Z.
Robert Birnbaum interviewed Harrison for TMN in June of 04.
Speaking of heroes, Jim Harrison has been elected into the The American Academy of Arts and Letters (pdf) and Mario Batali threw a party for him.
"I then start cutting --usually doing the part I am most likely to mess up on first, just in case I do, then I don't have to do the whole piece over again. But mistakes are what I like about the process. There us no way to fix it except through new choices." Cynthia Houng interviews artist and papercutter Nikki McClure.
A Short Guide to Iraq (pdf), a scan of a War Department booklet handed out to soldiers in 1943. Via Murmurs.
Another collection to love: The Book Inscriptions Project. "These inscriptions -- not to be confused with author dedications or autographs -- are personal messages written in ink (or lead or marker) and were given as gifts from one person to another."
Relink. Start in 1957 and you won't be able to stop until you reach 1977 in Paul Giambarba's highly personal account of The Branding of Polaroid. Required reading.
"The Royals were frugal. And traded Mike MacDougal. Chicago now employs him - He turns ballgames into kugel." Bardball, "resurrecting the connection between baseball and poetry" from FotA James Finn Garner.
"When someone asks you for 'edgy,' what they really mean is, 'I'll know it when I see it." And this is no way to start a project." Axel and Josh fire off another perfectly-aimed pdf mortar shell, Dirty Words & Dick Jokes.
"Green is the new black." Greener Postures, "Hacking Through the Biodegradable, Zero-Carbon, Ecochic Overhype" from New York Magazine. Very funny. Via PSFK.
Ooh, a blog dedicated to predicting the impending death of print magazines and tracking those that have recently died (and some that have come back). Who will be next in the Magazine Death Pool?
"What do you call a traffic jam caused by drivers slowing down to look at an accident or other diversion on the side of the road?" Round here it's a gapers' block. Via, of course, Gapers Block.
Everything Michael Bierut knows about design he learned from The Sopranos.
Safire hots up.
Local note: the Printers Row Book Fair is going on this weekend and will feature loads of friends of the agency and Field Tested Books contributors, including Jonathan Eig, James Finn Garner and Ben Greenman. Not to be missed: CP's own Kevin Guilfoile moderating the panel, "Criminal Minds," tomorrow at 2:30. The full schedule is here (pdf).
Is it a conspiracy? No, it's The Realist Archive Project -- a complete republishing of all 146 issues of Paul Krassner's classic and controversial magazine, The Realist.
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the publication of On The Road, a book that started as a scroll and has had many covers since then. This one really screams literature, doesn't it?
Posting to claim this coinage, as it relates to graphic design. The 2012 London Olympics Logo is part of a larger, emerging design movement which we will now refer to as The New Brutalism. That is all.
Best name for a blog full of the "sentimental musings of an aging British expat," Crying All the Way to the Chip Shop.
"American workers, on average, spend 45 hours a week at work, but describe 16 of those hours as unproductive." So you know, our corporate mission at CP is to try to get that number up to 20.
"He must be thinking I'm a total post-Neanderthal maroon what wouldn't know an old tool if it came up and nipped him in the arse." What The Superior Works found at a yard sale. Via Mefi.
There's plenty of bashing going on in plenty of places but as you might expect, the discussion of the London 2012 logo at Speak Up is mostly thoughtful and randomly brilliant.
"I tend to lose interest quickly. My boredom threshold keeps going lower over the years." Herr Spiekermann chats with Ideas on Ideas about business. Thanks Howard.
Issue 2 of Graphic Define Magazine on the business of design.
Emily Yoffe, "For the Human Guinea Pig column, I do things you might consider doing yourself, until you reject the idea as outlandish." Like taking a vacation on a drilling rig in the Gulf of Mexico for example. Via TMN.
Great illustrated excerpt from Penguin by Designers by David Pelham at CR. Required reading.
Marriage of Heaven and Hell and other books by William Blake, all with magnificiant color illustrations and words.
Naz brings Absenter, formerly his photoblog, back to life as a place to talk about cycling, and begins with a post about the beautiful cycling mag Roleur. Thanks for reminding me to order some back issues of that! Gorgeous.
Underware creates some new punctuation, introducing The Irony Mark. Via Stan. A cute idea but if we can't even agree on The Interrobang, how are we going to agree on this?
"Some writers set scenes. O'Toole is at his best working with what stinks." Jonathan Eig on A Confederacy of Dunces. Plan your summer reading with the Field-Tested Books Book.
"You don't know me, but I saw you in Alien vs. Predator 2. That scene with you & all the lasers was incredibly cool. You were like, solid ice." From a booklet of love letters to the islands of the sub-Antarctic, from a Karel Martens assignment to graphic design students at Yale. Via Design Observer.
FotA and Field Tested Books contributor, Maud Newton, was a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation yesterday, giving summer reading suggestions.
On this day in 1914 the first installment of Edgar Lee Masters's Spoon River Anthology was published.
Add bookmarks. The Morning News 2007 Editors' Awards for Online Excellence.
Steal This Poem.
Drawing for Memory by that one guy with the glasses I met in Austin.
How does the USA relax? How has that changed over the past few decades? "Leisure in America" (pdf). Via Making Sense With Facilitated Systems.
Mike D's How to Snatch an Expiring Domain. A fascinating chase story.
"'I'm far more dangerous now, because I don't care at all."
Excerpts from Chris Salewicz' Redemption Song: The Ballad of Joe Strummer at PopMatters.
Collision Detection on tech-savvy parents picking unusual names for themselves and their kids, so they'll be more "googleable."
Good Magazine has a very interesting article on Five Innovations in Urban Transportation that you won't find in America, yet. I vote for Naked Streets.
The other Flatland, Edwin K. Abbott's tale of interdimensional experience from 1884.
Darn, how did we miss this profile in Step Mag on Naz, from Gapers and various other ventures?
MIT offers courses online free plus selected video and audio lectures. Via Like Art.
Regrets, they have a few, in a thread at Gapers.
The Big Noob returns.
"ME: Sydny, you're acting like a child. SYDNY: Because I am a child." Scott's back from vacation.
David Gutowski asks authors what they were listening to while they were writing. Ben Greenman answers in reference to his short-story collection, the recently published, A Circle is a Balloon and Compass Both. Coincidentally, Ben and David were both Field-Testers for us last spring.
"I'm not saying this bus will give you immortality. Oh, no. I'm just saying that if you buy it, you'll never die. There's a difference." Hands down the best eBay auction description of the cleanest 1961 VW Bus 23 Window Microbus Transporter DeLuxe ever written. Scroll for it all. Great. Great. Great. Thanks a million Marshall.
Book-A-Minute.
After a while, Emmy said, "What was the name of that nice girl he brought with him? The blond one who helped me with the dishes?" Ken shoved a forkful of meat loaf into his mouth and said, "Marilyn." KG's I Got No Papers Show You What I Am.
Need some help putting together a summer reading list? We have 78 good ideas at just thirteen cents each.
More "woody" words: Bulbous Bouffant.
Can you tell the prose that won the Nobel Prize for Literature from the prose that was randomly machine-translated from German? Try Mikhail Simkin's quiz. Via About Last Night.
"Oh thank you, dear... you know, it's a funny thing, dear... all the naughty words sound woody." A classic MP sketch [transcript] happened upon after reading this excellent Wikipedia entry.
Cabinet Magazine, A Minor History of Miniature Writing. Via Core 77.
On "Just", Awesomeness, and ™. An excellent guest editorial at Speak Up, by Alexander "Fish" Bohn.
Photoset of the moment: 1960's Teensploitation Cover Gallery. Via Cynical-C.
"City of Glass" by Paul Auster, Quinn's travel.
On this date in 1932 William Faulkner reluctantly arrived in Hollywood.
Dan Savage promotes a new urban vision: "Liberals, progressives, and Democrats do not live in a country that stretches from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to Mexico. We live on a chain of islands. We are citizens of the Urban Archipelago, the United Cities of America." Via Platial.
A smart, beautiful post on architecture at Eikongraphia, The Endgame of Minimalism.
Colour Lovers' 11 Great Color Legends, like "Why is Red the International Color for Stop?" Via Chris Glass.
Talk about an awkward couple of days for someone at that office (if they're still employed): June Issue Of Business 2.0 Deleted Before Going To Print. Via Andy Rutledge.
FotA James Finn Garner's new book Recut Madness: Favorite Movies Retold for Your Partisan Pleasure. Read the excerpt for the red state version of 2001.
I Know Who Killed Desmond Taylor,
"The 'bumping off' of a famous person like William Desmond Taylor is the sort of oyster that any detective delights to open." Great read, via Etc.
"16. 10 points for arguing that a current well-established theory is 'only a theory', as if this were somehow a point against it." The Crackpot Index.
"My Dear Mr. Cleaver: This paragraph has absolutely nothing to do with anything. It is here merely to fill up space. Still, it is words, rather than repeated letters, since the latter might not give the proper appearance, namely, that of an actual note."
For Evan, here's what you're looking for. Paul Giambarba's The Branding of Polaroid, 1957-77 is a great story, well-told. There is much to be learned from following along from the inside.
KG learns about the the Flemish Bend, the Double French Shroud and the Chest Becket, in a piece for the NYT Magazine called School of Hard Knots.
Drap stops in Missouri to pick up pieces of the big ol' roadside sign he bought on eBay and it gives him, and us, a few things to think about. The Arrows of Sedalia.
Hours of fun for word nerds.
A bright, clear spring day like today is perfect for reflecting on the importance of paying attention when things are good. Saying this much more eloquently is novelist Zadie Smith reading Frank O'Hara's Animals for our Verse By Voice feature.
Crans is starting to forget the things he dislikes about NYC as he gets ready to leave it.
On this date in 1928, the final volume of the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary was published. The complete story is told in Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman. Highly recommended.
"...to what extent will they rely on the shopping judgements of other people? And of course which people?" Jan Chipchase asks some good questions, as usual, at Future Perfect.
A Sherlock Holmes mystery if it were written by the writers of the TV show Lost. Via TMN
In prepping for the trip to Los Alamos tomorrow, I've been pointed to some great sites, including My Strange New Mexico and The Bomb Town News Observer, specifically this post, "Tales from Haunted Bomb Town." Really wish we had the time to go check out Urraca Mesa in Northern New Mexico, aka "the gateway to the underworld." Creepy.
Get a new middle name and new cousins. Lonesome No More!
1992 Playboy interview with Kurt Vonnegut and Joseph Heller. "Painters and poets can be deeply upset by the good luck of a colleague. Writers and novelists really don't seem to give a damn."
A world with one less hero.
"Since this project ended I have thankfully gone back to being my old not-shopping self again." More on "The Wall of Mall" from Rob Walker, including his interview with its creator, Rosemary Williams.
This is not for everyone, but as we're fond of saying, "people who like this sort of thing will find it exactly the sort of thing they like." Ezra Pound reads his own poetry. A different sort of Verse By Voice. Posted by UBU, via Mefi.
In response to the whole tiresome "civility in blogging" discussion that has been going around recently, Greg has developed The Airbag Department of Security Blog Advisory System for the good of the homeland.
The Artist's Guide to Making Money. "Disclaimer: Do not expect any actual advice, tips, or tricks for making money. We can in no way guarantee that you will ever make money as an artist, or otherwise." Fab.
Bldgblog posts an excellent, wide-ranging interview with CP hero Walter Murch. His In the Blink of an Eye is required reading btw.
"In one of the skyscrapers, on the 119 story, you will see a sign, 'Old People Restored to Youth by Electricity, While You Wait.'" The Predictions of a 14 Year Old in 1901. Via bblinks.
Why Terry Teachout is our favorite drama critic. Friday's unvarnished WSJ review of The Year of Magical Thinking.
"5. Start as close to the end as possible." Kurt Vonnegut's rules for writing fiction.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road and Gary Shteyngart's Absurdistan face off in the Championship Match of the 2007 Morning News Tournament of Books today. How'd you do in your office pool? We did pretty well.
FotA and former Coudalian, Dave Reidy, has returned to the internet at Closerlook's new blog, Work + Play. Consider it bookmarked by all here at CP, Dave.
The Winterhouse Writing Awards is calling for entries. "To recognize excellence in writing about design and encourage the development of young voices in design writing, commentary and criticism."
On this day in 1917 Leonard and Virginia Woolf purchased a small, used handpress.
"Even if you only stay on a short trip in Japan, you will get in touch with 'product poetry': small texts - almost like poems - written in a foreign language and placed on several kinds of Japanese consumer goods." Great post at PingMag.
FotA and Field-Tested Books contributor, Jonathan Eig's newest book, Opening Day: The Story of Jackie Robinson's First Season.
Stumbled upon: James M. Cameron's site for his forthcoming book about Barton Watson & The Great CyberNET Scam. Really interesting.
If You Can Read This, You're Hired, by Tamye Riggs. Via Design Observer.
Two of our favorite Chicagoans together on the radio. Our Guest Editor this month, Edward Lifson, visits Ken Nordine for Hello Beautiful! A must listen.
My favorite source of tattoo flash art, Richard Scarry's Best Word Book Ever has changed quite a bit through the years. Via Things.
Play the punctuation game, smartypants.
Like, um, two peas in a pod, Matthew Baldwin's Cliche Rotation Project and the TMN Contest for Total Idioms.
Lana Turner's Ex Maintains Dreams of Grandeur, a fab NPR profile by Jennifer Sharpe.
The top 2000 Kanji.
We're 2 for 2 in predicting the TMN 2007 Tournament of Books, and today's match looked lke a squeaker, on paper at least.
"After the zany shenanigans of Absurdistan, I was more than ready for the violence and tragedy of the Nigerian civil war." The 2007 TMN Tournament of Books is off to a fast start and so are we, we're 1 for 1 after the first day.
We're not sure if the morningline odds we set for the 2007 TMN Tournament of Books will help you win the cool contest that was just announced. But, if you knew the outcome, it wouldn't be gambling.
"The book as an art object and a collectable is an old convention that used to be reserved for the upper crust. Taschen has a made it a bit more democratic. Either that or people have more expendable income." AIGA interview by Steven Heller with Jim Heimann, Executive Editor of Taschen America. Via Z.
Instructions for "How To Be a Better Lover" and "How To Clean Out Your Desk" are similar in many ways. Essential advice from Axel Albin & Josh Kamler of Language in Common. Also, check their daily weblog Tiny Gigantic. Bookmarked.
"The Disney theme-park inspired love hotel close to my office looks like it's about to close." When memories last longer that buildings that birthed them, from the always observant Future Perfect, by Jan Chipchase.
"Compare yourself downward." Karen Ingram writes to tell us about the new book Secrets of the Superoptimist "about turning the negative into positives, in extreme situations." Here's the book site, nice cover too.
Looking to move beyond your bookmarks and read something new? You might find something to your liking at Growabrain's Blog of the Day.
"I never knew what color stuff a girl had on before I knew Ruthie. But with Ruthie you know she's got something blue on." From "Both Parties Concerned," an "under-published" story by J. D. Salinger. Via eNotes Book Blog.
"Over some Niagara. Falling." On this day in 1965, Sylvia Plath first met Ted Hughes.
Our Verse By Voice feature asked people to read their favorite short poems into our answering machine. He didn't call, but Coop found a recording of Robert Frost reading the most famous of his own.
Pingmag interviews Scott Milano, Director of "Verbal Indentity" for Interbrand Japan.
"If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out." George Orwell's 12 Writing Tips. Via Chris Glass.
The Morning News 2007 Tournament of Books announcement and "zombie round" voting.
KG remembers Hoist the Flag and Mr. Clark.
Apostrophe Catastrophe. Much is wrong here but remember, not every mistake you make is a mistake, check for Non-Errors, "those usages people keep telling you are wrong but which are actually standard in English." Which is the sort of attitude up with which I will not put.
Robert S. writes, "Check this site full of petitions to our Prime Minister, especially the ones promoting a ban on snare drums, televised public executions for failed tv show contestants, and recognition of Jedism as a religion.
On this day in 1922, the book was published. Apparently the previously mentioned round of golf took place a couple weeks earlier.
"My fellow Americans, we are learning new things about ourselves every day, and yet our idioms remain in a pickle, full of baloney!" A quick new contest from The Non-Expert.
"Before you enrolled in your shorthand class, you may have asked yourself this question: 'Can I really learn Gregg Shorthand?' Of course you can, just as millions of others have." Via Designer's Library.
Hey SE and BB, get ready to ignore everything and everyone.
"My three-year-old son has a Laura Lippman obsession." KG's latest over at The Outfit.
A magazine rack for PDF titles. Great idea. Via Airbag.
Dreaming Methods, "creative writing fused with new media." Reader-guided projects, experiments in story-telling and abstract narrative.
More data for MS's calculations. Andy Baio on "Pirating the 2007 Oscars."
"Dear Harold: I have decided to reject your rejection." John O'Hara to Harold Ross, January, 1939. A selection from the excellent Today in Letters. Via Emdashes.
The Ten Most Expensive Books Sold in 2006. Via Things.
Give this site a tv series and we'll all watch it religiously: I Did Not Know That Yesterday. Via Chris Glass.
Step inside The Titian Room at The Hermitage in St. Petersburg. Breathtaking. More room panoramas here.
"Like the arctic ice cap, the historical market penetration these weeklies had, is not coming back any time soon." A thoughtful Roger Black piece on the new Time Mag titled "Out of Time." I might have gone with "Time Out of Mind."
The End As I Know It is the first novel from longtime CP co-conspirator Kevin Shay. The book is set in the days before the year 2000 and Kevin has been retroblogging a few of the things bug-fearing people were saying online at that time in "On This Day Pre-Y2K." Great.
"Their work is one percent inspiration, the rest sweat-drenched detective work; their products are never finished or perfect, just varying degrees of 'less broken.'"An excerpt from Scott Rosenberg's new book, Dreaming in Code. Disclaimer. Crown is advertising the book on our ad network, but I'd have ordered it regardless. Looks great.
"What makes something the real thing?" Michael Bierut revisits the 1983 book, Quintessence: The Quality of Having It.
"It was brilliant. It was sophisticated. It was meaningful. And I wish I had thought of it myself." KG on meaning, Pynchon, and one in 100 people.
"I'm an evolutionary biologist, more than a designer. I don't know what design is anymore, I create form."
DesignBoom interview with Ross Lovegrove.
A supervillain hideout better known as the tailrace tunnel at Niagara Falls. Via Mefi.
You are travelling with Jan Chipchase by reading Future Perfect aren't you?
Puzzles at Omniglot, a site about writing systems and languages of the world. Via Information Nation.
From two of our compatriots in The Deck, The House Style Guides from A List Apart and The Morning News. Wise advice except for their united but ultimately misguided support of the serial comma.
"Before Americans ruled America, French explorers ran rampant across the land, seeking, discovering, naming, and harming. We celebrate the leading figures of this movement and their defining facial characteristics." Via bblinks.
What Daniel Eatock has done and would like to do.
Great VF piece by Frank DiGiacomo on George Lois, Harold Hayes and Esquire Magazine in the '60s.
I never cared for Winslow Homer after Steve Martin's scathing review in "Cruel Shoes." Sadly, that is the one page of the book that's not online.
If I go on the record here saying Michael Crichton is a mediocre hack, will he cast me as a poorly-endowed pedophile in his next book? Maybe if I taunt KG enough, he will.
On this date in 1946, "All of life is six to five against."
On this date, "He Do the Police in Different Voices."
"These letters spell out the first seven lines of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. They were photographed in order, west to east, as I walked the Pilgrims' Way from Winchester to Canterbury." Via Ascent Stage.
Kottke on the year in errors. Awesome. Tons more at Regret the Error. Apologies accepted.
Wm$na interviews artist Daan Roosegaarde about "Dune 4.0" and the technonolgy behind this so-cool installation.
Sorta related. Mars in Radio Drama. Thanks Ryan.
The NY Times travel section discovers CP's little neighborhood. We were here when it was mostly all pork rinds and meat trucks and not so much hot models and vodka drinks.
"When you're dealing with something from Proust or Henry James, all hell breaks loose." NPR interview with Kitty Burns Florey, author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog, "The quirky history and lost art of diagramming sentences." Via Sycamore.
BibliOdyssey on Ancient Spanish Ballads; Historical and Romantic, an illuminated gift-book from 1841.
"No one knows exactly why or how Kate has been able to do what Martha Stewart or Whitney Houston or Levi's or the Gap can't." A Model Transformation, about the 'rebranding' of Kate Moss, by Debbie Millman for Speak Up.
Suggested new literary terms. For example, "Austentacious: A book written in the style of, or influenced by, Jane Austen. See Emma Tennant, Karen Joy Fowler." Via Sycamore.
Like Flickr, but without the photos. Salubrious.
Not so famous last words.
The Six-Word Memoir Contest. Via 52 Projects.
City of Sound on the current Alan Fletcher retrospective at London's Design Museum.
More than 1,000 picture links to places that figure in the lives and writings of famous authors. Via MGaB.
Jimmy Breslin saw Bobby recently. Here's what he remembers.
A surprisingly touching WSJ middle column about how performances of a tribal war dance before Trinity high school football games has brought together Tongans and Texans in the suburbs of Dallas.
"I have spent almost more time with these violent, imaginary friends of mine than I have with my family in recent years." Author Mark Winegardner on the last (thankfully) of The Godfather series. Via The Sycamore Review.
So you know. That and Who or Which.
Andrew Womack (The Knife) of TMN, on a new slate of Congressional nicknames.
Today in 1851. "The book he was counting on to rescue his reputation and his finances, was so belittled and slandered in the crucial first weeks following publication in America that it never had a chance."
"In 1935, well into the era of Soviet communism, Russian satirical writers Ilya Ilf and Evgeny Petrov came to the U.S as special correspondents for the Russian newspaper Pravda. They drove cross country and back on a ten-week trip, recording images of American life through humerous texts and the lens of a Leica camera." The 80 year old precursor to Borat: Ilf and Petrov's American Road Trip.
Despite its name, the book, Why Mommy is a Democrat, is surprisingly non-partisan. Those to the Left can use it to further indoctrinate their children. Those on the Right can use it to frighten, in that the illustrations, of a seemingly drunk squirrel, are more than a little terrifying. Via AdFreak.
"Nothing I've achieved since then has resonated in my mind, since all I can ever think of is, 'You moron, you're so lame, obvious, and pseudo-hip!'" Michael Musto's review of Spy: The Funny Years. Thanks Sandy!
Presidential Doodles. Some are pretty out there. Personally, I don't think you've seen Presidential Doodling until you've seen a good Dick Cheney as drawn by KG.
"I would have loved to have asked her about the three steps at DeLendrecies. Even if she had no idea why I remembered, I think she would have liked to have known I remembered." Beautiful, touching Bleat today, from Lileks.
The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and The Spectre Bridegroom. From the 'Sketch Book,' by Washington Irving 1886. Illustrated with original designs by eminent artists. So cool, especially the page scans. Via gmt+9 (-15).
Notebooks, letters, drafts, etc from Woodward and Bernstein's Watergate Papers exhibited at the University of Texas HRC.
How Magazine's big feature on our officemates from 37signals this month looks nice in photos but even better in the magazine. El Boton gets a nice write-up in this issue too.
Ted McClelland is there when Red Green films his last show.
"Things Online That I Am Sick Of."
NPR interview with Nobel prize winner Orhan Pamuk. His novel Snow absolutely killed me.
Even Thomas Pynchon isn't safe when his son joins Facebook. Via Fimoculous.
"I made a conscious decision to look more open and less dense without losing that smart edge that people have come to expect," Magazine Editor Undergoes Sleek New Redesign. Via TMN.
A collection of slang from the 1920s. Via Chris Glass.
Ephemera, exploring the world of old paper. Found among other things.
"I've got 30 typefaces sitting on my hard drive right now that will never get made because I can't get them to work for more than about seven characters." Veer interviews designer Corey Holms.
Even Though I Can't Explain It I Already Know How Great It Is. KG's latest for The Outfit.
Ironic Sans interview with Seetharaman Narayanan. Now where do I know that name from?
FOTA and Field Tested contributor Mike Sacks has just launched his new website, the aptly named MikeSacks.com, an archive of his writing for GQ, The New Yorker and Esquire, among others.
"Only bad guys have goatees." From The Grand List of Overused Science Fiction Clichés
The 2006 recipients of the Winterhouse Awards for Design Writing & Criticism are Thomas de Monchaux and Katherine Feo. Here here.
"On the opening page of a small leather-bound book in a University of Virginia library, graduate student Robert Stilling found an inscription in brownish-gray ink. It was a poem by Robert Frost, in the poet's own hand, unknown and, Stilling believes, unpublished." From Bram.
Two close friends of the agency, 37 Signals and John Warner are mentioned in today's WSJ story on the modern importance of list-making.
Local note. "Robert Falls' appallingly expensive desecration of 'Lear,' mounted by the Goodman Theatre in celebration of his 20th year as its artistic director, is the worst production of a Shakespeare play I've witnessed in a lifetime of theatergoing." Terry Teachout makes up my mind.
The Chicago Manual of Style, asked and answered. Via Gapers.
Hero. On this day in 1970 John Dos Passos died at the age of seventy-four. BTW: The Library of America's single-volume of The USA Trilogy edition is beautiful.
The AV Club on eighteen '70s and '80s XXX Movies with memorably, kooky trailers. Via LHB.
KG puts his Cast of Shadows to Marshall McLuhan's "Page 69 test," which says that you can pick which books you want to read by opening to page 69 and deciding if you like what you read there.
Clamor Magazine takes on American Apparel.
Doubt is better than certainty. The eighth of ten things Milton Glaser has learned. Via I LIke.
"Rather it is the collection and display of stuff with a preservative intent and historical mindset that makes a museum." Tom Scheinfeldt's response to an All Things Considered piece in part, about our Museum of Online Museums.
Martha Bayne surveys the alt-media scene in The Reader's Chicago 101 series and finds us an "anything-goes experiment in the creative potential of Web publishing." Thanks for that.
David K. Israel digs up what happened when the lawyers got a hold of the Ten Commandments, at TMN. Related: Breaking them all before breakfast.
YouWorkForThem's Profile Magazine Number Three is up and includes a talk with John Maeda.
"On the positive side of the ledger, the pry marks, where Mr. Warner used a crowbar to get the door to open again, have barely begun to rust and decay." John is selling his B210.
Anthony Qualin's Confederacy of Dunces: A Virtual Tour. "This page does neither the novel nor its distinctive hero justice." Perhaps not, but for fans, it's an interesting trip. Jonathan Eig's Field-Tested review makes for a fine accompaniment. Via the boy with the large heart.
To follow JC's video game ads post, here's an ad for John Hodgman's book, a parody of George Plimpton's Intellivision ad. "Who even needs computer baseball?"
"Nothing could have prepared me for the stupidity of this event, except perhaps an honest account of how truly awful it was. I've been unable to find such an account, online or elsewhere. I offer my dissent to the pretense that is Burning Man." From Stuart.
An interview with KG in Shots Ezine about Wicker (aka Cast of Shadows) in which he talks about Kierkegaard. But don't let that put you off. He also talks about The Gilmore Girls.
"That is how I remember them, circa 1980, when I was a slip of paper in a pullover shirt." You must read Paul Ford's Men Standing Around Broken Machines.
Amoral or immoral. Proscribe or prescribe. Troublesome pairs. Via lifi.
Shift 118 is up and includes an interview with Mamoru Kanom, art director of WOW.
"The process I so reassuringly put forward at the outset had almost nothing to do with the way the project actually went." The truth from Michael Bierut, This is My Process.
Concepts for a trio of new Mac spots. From Bram.
"...while it never had the book you were looking for, you always went home with five others you couldn't resist." From Terry Teachout's Serendipity Revisited at About Last Night.
About the previous post. "Humans have a hot hunger on unrealistic things." About Wilp's Afri Cola campaign, machine-translated. Wilp obit. Wiki entry on Afri Cola. German wiki entry on Wilp, translated.
JC talks about design and technology in the current issue of Communication Arts, along with our studio mate Jason from 37signals.
Michigan man held in contempt of court for plagiarizing TMN's Matthew Baldwin.
Field-Tested contributor, George Saunders' latest, very funny piece in the New Yorker, Proclamation.
"Soon, students recognize that a both a 50 and a 90 are failing grades in the game of life. Is removing 90 percent of the fingerprints from the inside of an apartment after a black-bag job good enough? Good enough for five to 10 for breaking and entering maybe, but that's about it." John Warner's latest at TMN.
"The boy announces his intention to 'go back for boat ride.'"
"This is the work - the exploration we did for you in all this time. And then he would pull out the logo he designed in the first week and say: This is the ideal one." From an interview with Ross McBride at PingMag.
Devoured the paperback on vacation and just ordered the hardcover. An illuminating, bittersweet novel about memory and visual ephemera by CP fave Umberto Eco, The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.
Michael at Design Observer says all the things I have been saying about Helmut Krone lately, only more lucidly. Both of us have been inspired by the new Helmut Krone. The Book which is mandatory for any art director's library.
Joe Meno's latest, the Boy Detective Fails is shipping now. Fabulous cover.
How to speak Gibberish. Sidiga, midiga, tridiga.
Bedtime Stories by Thom Yorke of Radiohead. Via TMN.
"Here is something that the psychologists have so far neglected: the love of ugliness for its own sake, the lust to make the world intolerable. Its habitat is the United States. Out of the melting pot emerges a race which hates beauty as it hates truth." H.L. Mencken's Libido for the Ugly, from 1927. Via Things.
"I do have the tools to be an effective teacher. I understand intimidation and threat. I have a stare that could bore a hole through Kevlar." John Warner's latest at TMN.
Ran across while looking for something else entirely: World War Two Books, small press books about nearly everything. Some interesting covers too.
Read the first couple of posts and you'll be hooked, New York Hack, tales of being a cab driver in NY.
Filling in the Hudson to Rebuild New York, from the March 1934 issue of Modern Mechanix. Via Designboom.
Attention Wes Anderson, yet another letter from Walter and Donald. Very funny and insightful.
Things' collection of ads in Popular Science from 1949. Really love the company name, Gulf Hamstery, from the "Raise Hamsters" ad.
FoTA John Warner is attempting a naked ploy today in an effort to manipulate the Amazon ranking for his new book Encyclopedia Brown and the Mysterious Presidency of George W Bush.
Before Seth Godin was Seth Godin, he was F.X. Nine, writer of Nintendo game fiction. Read nearly all of those as a kid and remember enjoying them a lot, so bravo.
"To launch a taboo, a group has to be poised halfway between weakness and power. A confident group doesn't need taboos to protect it." What You Can't Say by Paul Graham. Via The Miss who is Swiss.
"So I'm an old time machine now." A rare interview with Ray Bradbury by Jacqueline Russell of the Chicago Children's Theatre, about producing Dandelion Wine.
Peacay on Martinus Houttuyn's (1720-1798) Houtkunde. A book of wood.
"Guardsmen had been protecting the offices and using the boardroom as a command post. But with tensions rising inside the Dome, the Guard pulled back to the lobbies." In 1992 I was working in the Astrodome and as I watched Hurricane Andrew pummel south Florida, I knew that if it churned due west across the Gulf I would be spending the week inside the shelter of the Dome with tens of thousands of my fellow Houstonians. That never happened but the Sunday Times has a terrific story about the housekeepers and engineers and security guards who worked inside the Superdome and who battled to save it in Katrina's wake.
An alternate explanation of the rules of cricket. Shorter, and with less pies than KG's. Thanks Michael.
"The only difference is that the advertisers paid money to someone you'll never know and the graffiti artist didn't." The Aesthetic on Billboard Improvement."
KG on doing research for writing a thriller, at The Outfit.
Cave paintings: made by wise elders or idiot teens? Paleolithic Juvenalia.
The inaugural issue of Honey Eat Your Salad. Via Lounge72.
The heroism of everyday life. The
boyhood diary of Yoshio Nakatsu 1900-1969. Via Musaeum.
Thanks to Angela Gunn from USA Today for the nice mention of Field-Tested Books last night.
"In the spirit of the horn-dog culture that has allowed the single entendre to triumph, allow me to make my point through some hot lesbian action. Hot lesbian cultural studies action, that is." Ryan Bigge on the death of the double entendre." Via A&LD.
Weightshift is looking fresh. Naz also has an interesting piece on urban bike racing over at Gapers Block.
Dan Pink asks What Kind of Genius Are You? for Wired.
"I was pleasantly surprised by the reaction to my first miserable efforts at bookmaking. I had little knowledge of book design and none at all regarding the printing and binding of fine books." Henry Morris of The Bird and Bull Press. From their catalogue. Via Typographica.
"I remember commenting that, if we were going to liquidate the agency's assets, we might as well begin with the wet bar." Killing Phil Schieber: A true story of theft, suicide and the death of an ad agency, by Mack Simpson.
Interesting paper from Herman Miller as a PDF. Experience of Color.
"I don't give a hoot about reading reviews. What I want to read is the royalty checks." Mickey Spillane.
"Monet, Monet, Monet. Sometimes I get truly fed up doing Monet. Bloody haystacks." Art forger goes straight. Via Design Observer.
Harrowing excerpt from Vivien Goldman's Exodus: the Making and Meaning of Bob Marley and the Wailers' Album of the Century.
KG has joined The Outfit, a loose association of Chicago crime writers that's definitely worth a bookmark. Here's his first piece, Waitin' For My Odometer to Roll Straight Sevens.
Crow. One title from a series of smartly conceived and designed books from Reaktion.
Intentional or otherwise, a subtle, funny take on James Frey's A Million Little Pieces cover with Ayun Halliday's Dirty Sugar Cookies.
Tiger, Crow, Ant, Oyster, Animal.
"We subject the entire world to our idiosyncratic insecurities and then we think we are somehow deeper when they don't get it." The Nonist finds a postcard from a lifetime away.
Our favorite gloomy Swedish detective, Kurt Wallender from Henning Mankell's addictive series of novels is headed for the BBC. Also, check Mankell's stirring essay on the 'black antelopes" of Angola, part of a terrific series on soccer from Nat'l Geographic.
...and KG does sort of the same thing with a game show for The Morning News.
I'm a total mouse potato. Just one of the nearly 100 new words added to the 2006 Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition.
This post from Design et Typo, a "blog très sérieux et élégant d'une agence de Paris." is, as best as we can decipher, about nasty font conflict problems involving Suitcase and FontAgent Pro. But no matter, we do appreciate being used as an example.
Pingmag's excellent illustrated overview of Japan's Media Arts Centre ICC, including a look at some of the installations and shows from the last ten years there.
"I am firmly of the opinion that the Macintosh is Catholic and that DOS is Protestant. Indeed, the Macintosh is counter-reformist and has been influenced by the ratio studiorum of the Jesuits." Umberto Eco. Via TMN.
Adland teaches you the craft of being an obnoxious black turtleneck on the set of any commercial shoot. "If you're a copywriter and people ask you who you are, say 'gaffer.' You'll get treated better that way."
"WordCount is an interactive presentation of the 86,800 most frequently used English words." A very nice visualization.
"...design isn't the end of the process, but the beginning; that interpretation and improvisation will define the end-product, not the original design - in architecture, in music, in football."
Is the April cover of "Minature Donkey Talk" supposed to be an homage to Pet Sounds?
"If you don't subscribe to Miniature Donkey Talk Magazine, then you're not serious about donkeys!"
The Russian Lubok, illustrations and small bits of text sold at markets. The "popular print." Via Ramage.
John Warner asks our KG A Fistful of Questions. In other JW news, based on the title and cover alone, I can't wait for his next book.
The Dodo Blog, a blog all about Dodo birds. Via Cynical-C.
1880 Times 23 Sept., Mr. Richard Dean's 'Vicar of Laleham', clad in pontifical purple, earned the prize for the best dish of any coloured round potato. How is it that I have only now discovered the monthy OED Newsletter? Via TEV.
Blueprint vs. Blueprint. Via Things.
DT Max's great story in the New Yorker this week about Joyce's grandson: "The Injustice Collector."
Find more on today and other things Joycean at The Brazen Head. See also, Richard Ellman's definitive biography.
Ulysses, the dirty parts.
Robot Wisdom's The Internet Ulysses.
"I do not disparage 'trained' writers. My feeling, though, is that there is an overwhelming abundance of copy out there that is stale and 'cookie cutter'-ish. When everything starts to look the same, I have to believe that it is caused by too much of the same training." Writer Elf, where the benefit is lack of experience. Via AdFreak.
Kevin points us to The Bukowski archives, complete with manuscripts.
The Nonist on the short brilliant run of the idiosyncractic NYC newspaper called Three Weeks. More on the paper, including scans and text, at this obsessional about its editor, Henry William Brownejohns.
British mag, The Engineer turns 150 and makes select pages from their history available as PDFs. 1936's The London Television Station is a particularly nice one. Via Ramage.
"A gentle stroll among the seed of his seed was just what he needed. He called out for Jesus, and the Bolivian manservant appeared at his elbow. 'Take me to the little ones,' croaked the old man." The grim future of Dan Brown. Via Powell's.
Edward Tufte's Beautiful Evidence is finished and will begin shipping.
The programmer as journalist. An interview with Chicagoan Adrian Holovaty. Smart. Via Waxy.
Marian Bantjes on Modernism: Designing a New World 1914-1939 at the V&A, for Speak Up.
Two of our Field-Testers, novelist George Saunders and interviewer extraordinaire Robert Birnbaum, sit down for a wide-ranging chat at Identity Theory.
A scan of a first edition of Ulysses from 1922. Via Cartoonist.
Message in a bottle. On this day in 1910, O. Henry bought the farm.
The Road to Hell: Now Paved with Innovation? Michael Bierut on design competitions and/or ethical behavior.
Just posted one last batch of Booking Bands. We'll announce some winners soon! OK I lied, Monday!
Douglas Adams and James Frey get booked. Check back this afternoon, We'll post one more random batch of favorites and declare some winners.
The Grandfather Paradox. Via Giavasan.
Booking Bands meets Dr. Seuss and Charles Dickens. Still more to come, we'll announce winners on Friday
"Why are so many news shows so dully casted - except for the flamboyantly named superhero in front of the blue screen?" Clay Risen's The Weathermen at TMN.
Local note: KG will be at The Printers Row Book Fair Saturday talking about his Cast of Shadows which now is out paperback.
Where atomic bomb pits, Buddhist statuary, crashed Japanese airplanes, cargo cults, and flooding archipelagos all meet: Ballardian.com takes a tour of the South Pacific.
Kevo Sassouni hepped us to The Ode to Billy Joe Bob Dylan Thomas Jefferson Airplane Experience, a real-life literature/pop music mashup.
Booking Bands goes hair metal. Entries are closed, but I'll keep posting 'em and pick winners in the next couple days.
Booking Indie Rock Bands. Deadline is midnight tonight (friday.) Have a good weekend.
"Estate of Mind." Marion Meade on Dorothy Parker and Lillian Hellman, at Bookforum.
Booking Bands: The Eighties!. We've still got a huge backlog, so we'll close entries tonight at midnight, post more today and monday, and declare a winner next week.
Sorry, didn't get a chance to post any Booking Bands today, but we promise a bonanza tomorrow.
A look at bands whose names ARE books, and a British Literary Invasion. Oh, so many more to come.
9 days, 42 stops, 3650 miles. Wow, my arteries clogged just reading this.
More Mitch Albom fans, and some Modest entries: Booking Bands floats on.
Seven People You Won't Meet in Heaven. Booking Bands rages on.
"The Northwoods have a secret like no other kept." Our friend Jill Kuczmarski has rewritten (and illustrated) the Hodag legend for kids and cheeseheads Wisconsinites of all ages.
Booking Bands celebrates Cast of Shadows' paperback release.
Scott's Pulling Focus covers a lot of ground today. Hail, bagpipes, saltwater and in a bit of tease, some news on Ink, a new film based on Rumor Has It by Charles Dickinson.
Music to read KG's Cast of Shadows by. Largehearted Boy's Book Notes.
Our prolific May Guest Editor, Geoff Manaugh, interviews urbanist/author Mike Davis about cities, slums and a not-too-bright, nor-distant future.
Shakespeare and self-help soup: more bands, booked. The hits just keep coming.
The Guardian talks to Richard Linklater about his upcoming film based on Eric Schlosser's Fast Food Nation.
Corey Hart believes in a thing called love: Get booked. Keep sending 'em, keep checking back, we've got loads more.
Are You There Godsmack? It's Me, Margaret. Hundreds more coming next week.
10,000 Maniacs Under the Sea Keep 'em coming, unless you're Jeff Rutzky.
The Chemical Brothers Karamazov and more submissions in our "Booking Bands" contest. We've got a large backlog now, but keep them coming, we'll post the best. And no more Slaughterhouse 5 or DaVinci Code puns, OK?
"Could his later cognitive struggles be the result of a type of Shaken Bear Syndrome? Pooh needs intervention. We feel drugs are in order..." Pathology in the Hundred Acre Wood. Via Stung Eye.
"Dear Phone Companies, I see you've violated the privacy policies I signed onto your service with, by giving away data about all my calls placed, who they were placed to, and how long I talked..."
Interesting SlasHDot review by Graeme Williams of the new edition of Google: The Missing Manual.
The illustrious history of the yellow legal pad. Via Things.
Bono guest edits The Independent for a day.
Daniel Pinchbeck discusses the possibility that the Mayans were right all along: in 2012, "human consciousness" will be transformed. Mixing Terence McKenna, Walter Benjamin, Friedrich Nietzsche, and even crop circles, it's the return of Quetzalcoatl: read chapters one and two. Review of Pinchbeck's book at the Village Voice.
English, as she is spoke, at McMurdo and Pole. The Dictionary of Antarctic Slang. Via Evenings.
Kevin Kelly discusses the literary fate, technical strategy, and long-term consequences of scanning and digitizing every printed book: NYT Magazine.
Dead man lends a hand.
Robert Annable on drawing applications and classic drawing skills. "The level at which the softness (4B) of the pencil and the amount of pressure you apply through your fingertips has a direct influence on the outcome."
A would-be Field Tester just implied that JC was a "short-fingered vulgarian" in an email, sending us in search of some sweet Spy Magazine nostalgia. We found it: Ten Years Ago in Spy, which is almost ten years old itself.
Tomorrow is your last chance to plagiarize your way to fame at The Morning News.
"Time after time, playing Legos with my kids, I would fall under the spell of that old, familiar crunching. It's the sound of creativity itself, of the inventive mind at work, making something new out of what you have been given..." Michael Chabon, To the Legoland Station. Via Bookslut.
Hanzi Smatter: dedicated to the misuse of Chinese characters in Western culture.
"Or if you want, you can send a dump truck full of money to our office and we'll make the ad as big as you want." If our ad network, The Deck, isn't exactly right for you, maybe you should consider The Dreck, "the awful, self-contradictory advertising network for reaching few people, if any."
Eric Schlosser, author of Fast Food Nation, discusses the upcoming film version of that book, corporate PR, his next work, and the state of French fries in today's New York Times.
Very nice "little pieces of art for everyone" at Paper Cloud. Via Lounge72.
This year's line-up for Hay-on-Wye's literary mega-fest has been announced: expect to see Al Gore, Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, Alan Alda, Salman RusHDie, Christopher Hitchens, Will Self, James Lovelock, etc. etc. etc. etc. It's big.
Gawker posts a copy of a NYT internal publication [PDF] about the quality of writing at the paper. Enlightening.
Dennis Forbes' interesting facts about domain names. Like, um, they're all taken.
The Paris Review is offering a PDF version of their 1955 interview with French novelist Georges Simenon: read why "communication, complete communication, is completely impossible."
"A super-atomic sex factory! Kim Novak's Ex has the slickest bird pad in Britain - a cage the gals can't resist!" A handful of scans from 1968's Uncensored Magazine. Via PCL.
In the department of "great reads from the past," Howard Kohn and David Weir's RS piece from '75, Tania's World: An Insider's Account of Patty Hearst of the Run.
Closely related to the bird below, The Beak of the Finch: A Story of Evolution in Our Time, by Jonathan Weiner. Great story of scientists Rosemary and Peter Grant's twenty years on Daphne Major, an island in the Galapagos.
Apropos of nothing, KG's How To Explain the Rules of Cricket.
"I want to eat this book. In fact, I want to eat many books." Melissa Fischer tucks into The Penguin Graphic Classics, for Bookslut.
Take a tour of the weird, Dr. Seussian world of interconnected belts and machines otherwise known as the basement of the British Library. While you're there, check out the Camden Catacombs.
You're reading this post, so guess that means we're doing something right. CP is featured in the soon-to-be-released book Publish and Prosper: Blogging for Your Business by DL Byron and Steve Broback.
"Do you love to read in bed, like me? Well, I invented Bed Books because I love to read in bed, but I hated spending my time propping, piling and adjusting a bunch of pillows, only to find I still wasn't comfortable." Because lying on your back apparently isn't an option. Via SNP.
Who can't get enough Marfa? A terrific photo essay in the new issue of Blueeyes. Via Things.
Daring Fireball's most recent post, aside from attacking some journalism trends that drive us nuts, reinforces my argument that Apple's new "virus" ad is not only inaccurate ("Macs aren't affected by Windows viruses" does not equal "Macs are virus-proof"), it's also an open challenge to create new viruses for Macs.
Jonathan Weiss spent six years adapting J.G. Ballard's The Atrocity Exhibition for the screen; he now responds to his critics in a fire-breathing (though oddly amusing) interview at Ballardian: Parts One and Two.
"Maybe by the time we're done, Rosemarie and I will have become the learned, well-rounded individuals we have always pretended to be. But I kind of doubt it." Shame-Faced, plugging the holes in a spotty education. Via Scrubbles.
"...dozens of traditional phrases are now more commonly misspelled than rendered correctly in written English." You know, like "butt naked."
Our current Guest Editor, Geoff Mantaugh interviews David L, Ulin at Archinect about his new book The Myth of Solid Ground Earthquakes, Prediction, and the Fault Line Between Faith and Reason.
"In 1977, when the Chicago Park District announced that it was allowing players to use gloves in the Grant Park League, Royko became so enraged that he sued the city, He charged that this rule change had taken place after he had paid the $240 membership fee for his Daily News team and that it would be impossible to witHDraw and find a league 'in which men played like men.' ...The judge ruled in favor of Royko." Also don't miss the terrific companion slide show written and narrated by FoTA Rick Kogan.
This slipped past me when it was fresh, but Michael Bierut's column about why Design Observer posts aren't always about design could apply to our site even more accurately. Talking about our interests reveals more about our methods t