Reporting on NMPS 2012
Tuesday, July 31, 2012
At the TOKY Blog, I offer five key take-aways from attending the National Museum Publishing Seminar last June.
MATCHBOOK. bikinis meet their match
Monday, July 30, 2012
“Clever matches between bathing suits and books."
Great idea.
“The Gass Sentences: A Top 50”
Monday, July 30, 2012
Today is William Gass’ 88th birthday. For the Big Other website, John Madera asked some writers, readers, and publishers to name their own “literary pillars,” as a tribute to Gass and his “50 Literary Pillars” project from the early 1990s. After being invited to contribute, I went in a slightly different direction.
"First of all, we don't publish slideshows"
Friday, July 27, 2012
Great email from BuzzFeed CEO Jonah Peretti to his troops about why the site’s succeeding right now.
@KimKierkegaard
Sunday, July 22, 2012
KimKierkegaardashian: The philosophy of Søren Kierkegaard mashed with the tweets and observations of Kim Kardashian.
Genius.
Death in Spring — a beautiful cover, designed by Milan Bozic, and an unforgettably weird, savage, and poetic novel from the Catalan writer Mercè Rodoreda. Published in English for the first time by the commendable Open Letter Books. (How great, I learned only today, that it received this NPR nod on its “You Must Read This” series.)
[vimeo 45784128 w=500 h=281]
Reblogging myself from a new microsite for Abstractions Arrive:
On a Saturday morning in July 2012, the esteemed writer and internationally collected artist spoke about the release of Abstractions Arrive: Having Been There All the Time. The video was made by Stephen Schenkenberg and recorded in Gass’ St. Louis home (which holds 15,000 books).
Discussing "J R"
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
At Open Letters Monthly, Greg Gerke and Gabriel Blackwell have a long and interesting discussion about William Gaddis’ masterful novel.
n+1: Euro Cup 2012
Sunday, July 1, 2012
Dushko Petrovich, both wrapping up the tournament so far and previewing today’s final, offers this sketch of Mario Balotelli:
As a civilian, he is outlandish. Last year, his white Maserati was impounded twenty-seven times, accumulating £10,000 worth of parking tickets. He also accidentally set his house on fire with firecrackers, was fined a week’s wages for throwing darts at a teammate, and kept turning up unannounced in strange places, including a women’s prison in Brescia (“just fancied having a look”) and Xavarian College in Manchester, where he apparently came for the bathroom but stayed for a while.
On the pitch, he is always a threat. But to whom? He scores amazing goals, many of them invented out of nothing, but he often falls out of games and regularly gets kicked out. Several times this tournament, he has gone clear on goal and entered a kind of daze, as if he has forgotten where he is.
Atul Gawande on the ACA Ruling
Thursday, June 28, 2012
From the surgeon/writer’s impressive Daily Comment for The New Yorker:
The major social advances of the past three centuries have required widening our sphere of moral inclusion.
"Study Reveals Dolphins Lack Capacity To Mock Celebrity Culture"
Monday, June 18, 2012
This gem could have been a headline-only piece, but The Onion goes the full nine:
Even when presented with softballs like production stills from The Proposal, the marine animals exhibited no discernable reaction.
Gerhard Richter Painting,” certainly one of the finest artist documentaries I’ve ever seen. Smart, measured, surprising. Watch the trailer, then find it in your city. A big thanks to Webster University for bringing it to St. Louis.
"Triple Canopy Launches Sarajevo Residency"
Thursday, June 14, 2012
Art in America reports on this very interesting project:
On June 21, Brooklyn-based online magazine Triple Canopy will begin a two-week residency called Perfect Strangers, in Sarajevo. While in the Bosnian capital, where several of the country’s national cultural institutions were closed earlier this year due to inadequate government support, Triple Canopy will initiate a program of workshops, site-specific visual and textual works, lectures, and publishing. Artworks and other project components will examine Bosnia and Herzegovina’s fraught history and national identity.
The lack of funding, as well as tensions between Bosniaks, Croats and Serbs, has thwarted the development of cultural infrastructure since the Bosnian War. Triple Canopy deputy editor Molly Kleiman spoke to A.i.A. about the residency as an opportunity to share Triple Canopy’s resources and practices with artists in Sarajevo: “I wanted to bring the working method that we’ve used in New York to Sarajevo.”
Len Gutkin on "J R"
Saturday, June 9, 2012
I love seeing meaty new pieces on William Gaddis’ J R, which has just been released by Dalkey and remains one of the best novels I’ve ever read. Describing the book in one paragraph is tough, but Gutkin, [writing for Bookforum](https://www.bookforum.com/culture/-9277), does pretty well:
J R follows the rise and fall of JR Vansant, an eleven-year-old sixth-grader in Long Island who builds a massive financial operation by telephone. Gaddis assembles an enormous cast of characters around JR, all of whose lives come to intersect in some way with the sixth-grader’s paper empire. There’s his teacher Amy Joubert, who unwittingly introduces JR to the power of finance when she takes her students on a field trip to Wall Street, where her uncle runs the powerful Diamond Cable corporation. There’s Jack Gibbs, the manic, drunken physics teacher, in love with Amy and his own thwarted ambition. There’s Edward Bast, an aspiring composer hired with an arts-foundation grant to teach at JR’s school, where, hilariously, he is expected to direct a sixth-grade production of Das Rheingold (JR, of course, in the role of Alberich). Naïve and easily bullied, Bast finds himself coerced into acting as the JR Corp.’s public face, and throughout the novel he remains the only character aware that the new corporate mastermind is just a kid. The book’s comic invention is huge, complete with such vivid secondary characters as Crawley, a hunting-obsessed stockbroker who commissions Bast to write “zebra music” for the soundtrack to a film lobbying Congress to transport African big game to US national parklands, or Mr. Whiteback, the middle school principal who also runs the local bank from his office. Gaddis excels at serious farce, like Nathanael West on a massive canvas.
Sugimoto on Light
Friday, June 8, 2012
brief piece on the great photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto, who has a new collaboration with Hermès:
“Light is my medium to be investigated,” says the Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto, who spent years chasing bands of prismatic color around his studio in Tokyo and capturing them, with what was for him rapid-fire succession, using a Polaroid camera. In collaboration with Hermès, 20 of the artist’s abstract color studies have been translated into silk scarves in signed, limited editions of seven each. “Couleurs de L’Ombre” (Colors of Shadow), as the collection is called, is a moving tribute to the lowly Polaroid, which faces imminent extinction.
The Wire: An Oral History
Thursday, June 7, 2012
Odd that it’s in Maxim, but I would have read it anywhere.
"The World’s First and Only Completely Honest Résumé of a Graphic Designer"
Monday, June 4, 2012
A gem by Marco Kaye at McSweeney’s:
In my portfolio, you will see that unproduced package redesign for Squirtburst, inspired by kinetic typography popular in the West Coast concert posters of the 1960’s. In this designer’s opinion, it creates a visual appeal unprecedented in the beverage aisle. The client called it “uninspired” and said it would make kids “vomit if they stared at it for too long.” Next time you’re at the grocery store, please, pick up any Squirtburst drink and compare our taste levels.
David Grann: "The Yankee Comandante"
Sunday, June 3, 2012
An incredibly absorbing 26-page article by David Grann about William Alexander Morgan and the Cuban Revolution. (This follows “A Murder Foretold,” Grann’s equally extraordinary piece for The New Yorker that ran last year at this time.)
Eastman & Gass on Screen
Thursday, May 31, 2012
Abstractions Arrive project. I’ll be integrating some of the best video clips into the e-book in the coming week. (Anyone who already purchased it will see an updated version on their iPad when it happens.) Off to edit…