Tagged: books
Be a Book Giver on World Book Night – Boing Boing
Friends and foes in the western hemisphere, you’ve got until midnight EST to register. So g’head, ok. Thanks!
Be a Book Giver on World Book Night – Boing Boing.
Like this:
Missouri school district bans ‘biblically contrary’ novels by Kurt Vonnegut and Sarah Ockler – Kansas City News – Plog
This inspired a mouthful of biblically contrary language.
Future Shock, rescued
I rescued this yesterday, a Croatian translation of Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock. If anyone wants to borrow it, lemme know.
Published by Otokar Keršovani, Rijeka, Croatia (then Yugoslavia) in 1975, six years before I first read it in high school. The publishing house was named after a Yugoslav journalist and politician who was shot by the Ustasha regime in July 1941. You learn something new every day!
By the way, I’m always on the lookout for used copies of this for an ongoing project. The more languages, editions and colors, the better.
Bicycle Diaries Audio Book excerpt
Just a few days after Christmas last year, I was slowly worming my way through the security line at Montreal’s airport reading through the last pages of David Byrne’s Bicycle Diaries. The first security guard stopped me to ask just one question:
“So, you’re reading a little Che Guevara?”
I smiled. “No, that was Motorcycle Diaries. This is the self-powered version.”
He laughed, but made me step aside anyway before asking me to empty my entire backpack.
Mostly travelogue, Bicycle Diaries is an interesting, entertaining and snappy read by the former Talking Heads lead man who has, for more than two decades, travelled the world with his own folding bike. He muses about art, music, fashion, urban design and architecture, and dabbles in some history, religion and politics as well. The chapters on Buenos Aires, Manila and American cities particularly stand out a year later.
There’s a terrific excerpt from the audiobook version of the book on Boing Boing. Even if you’ve read the book, check it out!
Remembering Emerson, briefly
I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, originally uploaded by George Eastman House.
Grains of sand as art.
Via Discover is this fabulous gallery of magnified grains of sand. From A Grain of Sand – Nature’s Secret Wonder, by Gary Greenberg, published last week.
Check it out. A nifty promo video is here.
Seven Days in the Art World
I just finished reading Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, a fabulous account of a microculture –the high-end modern art world– that 99% of us will never experience.
Those seven days are actually seven chapters, drawn on experiences over five years, a period during which, as Times critic Ben Lewis notes, “art grew from a £2.2 billion industry to a £6.1 billion one, and where prices for some artists’ work increased by factors of between 20 and 80.”
In some respects it’s a breezy travelogue –the book begins with an auction in New York, and spans the globe with stops at the Basel Art Fair, a studio visit to Takashi Murakami in Japan and the Venice Bienale– but also a nicely paced study of the quirky dealers, curators, critics, collectors and hypesters that make up and live in that multi-billion $$ world. Thornton is a trained sociologist but also a journalist, making the quips and quotes culled from hundreds of interviews part reportage and part borderline gossip, and historically relevant as well.
You won’t look at an over-hyped Hirst, or an over-priced piece by a modern artist you’ve never heard off, the same way again.
The Chavez Effect
According to this post by Jake Tapper of ABC News, just after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano yesterday, the book’s Amazon sales rank was 54,295.
Before I went to bed last night it hit No. 17; it’s now sitting pretty at No. 5.
Eight Years Later
Discussing his latest novel, Man in the Dark, Paul Auster tells The Guardian about the root of his frustrations in recent years.
If there is something getting Auster’s goat, it’s American politics. It was his disgust at the outcome of the 2000 US elections that sparked the story-within-a-story at the heart of Man in the Dark, about a counterfactual US where civil war reigns and New York leads a movement to form the Independent States of America.
“It’s a war of bullets and bombs, whereas the divisions in the US now are similar to a civil war, but we’re fighting it with words and ideas,” he says.
He can pinpoint the idea for his latest story to his “frustration and disgust after the 2000 elections … Gore won, Gore was elected president, and it was taken away from him by political and legal manoeuvering, and ever since then I’ve had this eerie feeling of being in some parallel world, some world we didn’t ask for but we nevertheless got.
Pamuk Interview in Granta
I started reading Istanbul: Memories and the City a few nights ago and found this of particular interest.
Over the past several weeks, Granta, my favorite litmag, has been republishing pieces written by the 12 Nobel laureates whose work has appeared in the magazine since its modern incarnation in 1979.
Among them is an interview with Orham Pamuk conducted on December 13, 2005, one year before he won the Nobel and three days before he infamously went on trial in Istanbul for ‘publicly denigrating Turkish identity’ when he told a Swiss journalist: “Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do.” The charges were later dropped on a technicality, but the hatred from the right at home –along with the occasional death threat– continued.
I need certain things to write with some pleasure and intensity. If we leave aside paper and fountain pen, tea and coffee, what I need most is a certain irresponsibility. It is essential for writing fiction, at least for me: I need a playful irresponsibility, to twist everything in life, to turn situations around, to look for childish irony in the gravest drama, to organize the subtle ambiguities from which fiction arises. But now, I’m expected to be clarifying, clarifying, clarifying my statements. This lost spirit of irresponsibility —this childish freedom— is what I’m hoping to gain back. Because the more this affair grows, the greater the social responsibility that I have to face, and it is suffocating.
And
I am grateful for the international attention, and the backing of the liberal-leftist intellectuals here. It definitely makes me protected. But on the other hand, I feel that I have to answer this attention. One feels obliged. And that affects your imagination. And slowly this responsibility may convert you into a political commentator, or an activist, or a person with strong ideas. I’m not like that and I don’t want to be a person who cares about ideas more than life.
He and interviewer Maureen Freely, who has translated most of his works, then go on a tour of Istanbul, revisiting the setting of his novel, The Black Book.
Intro is here, interview begins here.
photo via wikipedia
