Archives for October 2009
“109 Lighting Books” by Airan King. I agree it’s a “didactic sculpture,” but in an interesting way.
Nostalgia: What’s the Role of the Past in Fashioning the Future? One of the better talks at Frieze with Owen Hatherley, Matthew Brannon, and Dan Fox.
“What is more visually appealing, (a) a Pall Mall butt floating in a coffee mug, or (b) those new Pop Art place mats in the Crate & Barrel catalog? If you answered (a), do we have a genre for you.” – My favorite tweeter, Colson Whitehead, on what to write next.
In addition to scripting a film about Theresa Duncan for Gus Van Sant, Bret Easton Ellis is working on “‘The Follower,’ an adaptation of Jason Starr’s 2008 crime novel. The series will be a satirical look at the romantic lives of a group of New Yorkers in their twenties, as seen from the point of view of a stalker.” Wonder if there will be mild social media storylines, Facebooking etc. Gossip Girl as directed by Michael Powell is exactly the kind of series I’d fund if I were responsible for such things.
No one voice is as valuable to books right now as Jessa Crispin’s: “The New York Times is a gatekeeper, absolutely. And for someone who has so much control over the conversation, you’d think Sam Tanenhaus would be less defensive, and less likely to look like he might leap over the table and rip out the throat of the man who called the Review “middlebrow,” but whatever. If you look at the statistics of what they’re letting inside the gates, though, you see mostly books published by Random House, a very small handful of translated fiction, a disproportionate number of white men…[So] many of the contemporary authors I love are often the ones being kept out of the conversation. They’re rarely, if ever, reviewed in the New York Times, they don’t get splashy features written about them and their night out with their friends. It’s hard for me to get worked up about the decline of reviews when I didn’t care much for them to begin with.”
Dan Hill reviews Alain de Botton’s book about his residency at Heathrow Airport: “A central theme is the (accurate, I think) impression that few industries are as “vulnerable to disaster” as commercial aviation, but that this leads essentially to a kind of pervasive frustration running through much of the experience. Here, the business simply cannot win. It is perpetually teetering on the the edge of delivering failure. All that changes is the scale of ‘disaster’. The fact that you’ve been delivered safely to and from 25000 feet is conveniently ignored by passengers in favour of being miffed by the size of the taxi queue, or by being infuriated by a mildly officious attendant at the check-in desk, or sitting for hours on the runway due to pre-departure engine failure at Bangkok, or by one’s luggage flying to Belgrade while you fly to Buenos Aires. Focusing on these smaller ‘disasters’ is perhaps a way of dealing with the extreme nature of the experience of flying, and the everyday aversion of real disaster by these incredible systems of technology and people. The whole act is too surreal to think too deeply about – so people don’t, generally rejecting thoughts about how precariously they’re travelling by distracting themselves with the more mundane and everyday breakdowns in a system that’s far too complex to run smoothly.” (via.)
Joel Achenbach in the Washington Post on Age of Twitter lit; “There is much confusion about what, precisely, should vanish in this broad media makeover. Is it print? Or just long stories? Or just bad, boring, dishwater-dull stories? Complicating the situation is that the online world is both increasingly dominant and, for many media organizations, stubbornly unprofitable.” He goes on to say, “The sages say that we’ve reached a situation where “content creation” no longer pays. Only “aggregation” is profitable. It’s a freak variant of Darwinism — the survival of the parasitic. But obviously there will be little of value to aggregate if only rich people and dilettantes can afford to type up their thoughts.” –which I don’t at all agree with, but generally this is one of the better looks at tech-influence literature. (via.)
You really should be reading Matthew Battle’s blog. Here’s a post on the WikiReader. Check out the comments. I’ve held off on the Kindle and will hold off on the Nook, because if I buy it now, I’ll want to upgrade by next at least by the end of the year. Compare this to the iPhone, which was set to go right out the gates. I got the iPhone in autumn 2007 and only upgraded a few months ago due to water damage. That’s almost two years with the original device. But the primary e-reader, Kindle or whatever it may be, will look and feel very, very different in two years. It had a bumpy start with too many problems and frustrated users. Right now, I’d almost much prefer something like the WikiReader, since it won’t be antiquated by 2011. Meanwhile, here is Tim Carmody on the possibility of a dedicated blog reader. I have a french press, a moka pot, and a drip coffee maker and I use all three of them regularly. I hope in the future there are affordable e-readers I can use depending on the reading and reading experience I’m looking for. Previously: Reading Only Devices: Why iPhone, Kindle, and Tablet PCs Might Mean Smarter Blog Comments
Autumn seems to beget a disproportionate share of American financial crises. But why? (Check out the comments.)
You can download most of the new n+1 issue in “their handsome original format for between $1 and $3 at Scribd.com.”
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