Janice Harayda pulled a very interesting quote from poet Philip Larkin—he isn’t a big fan of poetry readings. The quote comes from an old interview in the Paris Review. I just finished the anthology Paris Review Interviews, Volume I, by the way. Very, very good reading. [via bookslut]
Category: writing
A Jane Austen enthusiast ripped a few chapters from her books, changed the names, and submitted them to publishers. [via Mises]
Whither our literary arbiters? On NPR, a story about how newspapers are dedicating less space for book reviews than in the past. Goes along with the general decline in newsprint circulation & advertising dollars.
A choose-your-own-adventure story artfully stenciled on the sidewalks of San Francisco. I’d love to see illustrated comics on this kind of scale. I’m imagining entire sidewalk squares as panels wending around some plaza or across town. [via torrez]
Mike Davidson has a simple solution to spend less time dealing with e-mail overload: “Every e-mail I send to anyone, regardless of subject or recipient, will be five sentences or less.”
An interview with Chris Ware. “I think storytelling is one of comics’ aesthetic hurdles at the moment, which was the novelist’s problem 150 years ago: namely, to take comics from storytelling into that of “writing,” the major distinction between the two to me being that the former gives one the facts, but the latter tries to recreate the sensation and complexities of life within the fluidity of consciousness and experience.”
A long, excellent interview with Steven Johnson. A smart, knowledgeable interviewer can make such a huge difference.
The Oregonian newspaper is publishing its daily photos on Flickr. It’s looks like they’re consistently geotagging them, too. I absolutely love it. [via matt]
An interview with Scott McCloud.
One of the eternal tensions of comics might be this dual aspiration that we have, on the one hand, to ensure that words and pictures are integrated. That they feel as if they were drawn by the same hand, feel as if they belong togetherÄîthat theyÄôre flip sides to the same coin. And, on the other hand, to take advantage of the unique potential of words, and the unique potential of pictures, which often sends them in opposite directions.
In the course of the interview, he also mentions Dylan Horrock’s critical essay “Inventing Comics,” which is worth a read.
Writers need editors: “They remind you that your writing is not fragile”
Doc Searls talks about how to save newspapers. Nice tips there. The sad part is that readers (i.e. customers) have been complaining about many of these features for years [e.g. archive paywalls, complicated websites, lack of linking, etc.]
The Codex Seraphinianus is an encyclopedia of a fantasy world written in a fictional language. There’s a full set of scans from the book on Flickr.
Check out the a full reproduction of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, one of the most famous early printed books. It was probably written by Francesco Colonna in the mid-15th century and beautifully printed by Aldus Manutius in 1499. There’s also a copy of the 1592 English translation (Poliphilo’s Strife of Love in a Dream), which attempts to preserve the typography of the original. And of course, Project Gutenberg has a plain text English translation.
Last October in London the Detour Exhibition was held to showcase how creatives use their Moleskine notebooks. There’s more than 70 videos flipping through the work of illustrators, designers, architects, writers, and other Moleskine afficionados.
There’s a fairly good profile of Edward Tufte in the current Stanford Magazine.
Hugh MacLeod of Gaping Void wrote a manifesto on creativity over at ChangeThis.
A nice little writing kick-in-the-pants in the form of twenty basic plots: quest, adventure, pursuit, rescue, escape, etc.
From an excellent New Yorker article on the history of dueling:
Whatever else ÄúhonorÄù may be, it is the knowledge that every impertinence carries with it the seed of a greater, more fundamental insult: the suggestion that a person can get away with it—which is, after all, where humiliation really begins. Somewhere in our molecular makeup a sword-bearing protein squalls to have its day. But that doesnÄôt mean we have to listen… Ultimately, the duel was sustained not by a failure of communication but by a failure of imagination.
A Tom Swifty is a kind of wordplay that plays a pun on the content of the quoted sentence. They’re delightfully awful. E.g.”‘You have the right to remain silent,’ said Tom arrestingly.” They came originally from the Tom Swift series of books, whose writers tried to avoid repetition of the word “said” without any decoration, so they kept looking for adverbial additions. Here are a couple lists of Tom Swifties and an essay in appreciation of the books.
The California Milk Processor Board collects the top 100 rip-offs of their “Got Milk?” advertising campaign.
Mark Larson 