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William Bradford
I saw Bradford’s The Artic Regions in a MAPP promo email. Digital might be a good way to show the scuffs and details of rare or old books that may not translate well in a print book. It would feel...
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Tree of Codes
In Tree of Codes, Jonathan Safran Foer literally cuts Bruno Schulz’s The Street of Crocodiles into a new story. Check out the publisher, Visual Editions. Very cool. Here’s a video of him talking a bit...
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Jekyll & Hyde
Alberto Hernández reinterprets the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. After finding Tree of Codes I started digging through an entire world of “hybrid books” and visual literary publishing that is...
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Michael Lundgren
Michael Lundgren On Issuu, Lundgren has a mock-up of his Transfiguration series as a unconventionally long book with 4 images side by side in each spread instead of the usual 2. That doesn’t seem to...
View ArticleLinn Ulmann says
There is a Norwegian novelist who says “Writers must beware of their own good ideas.” You have this great idea, and then you start writing — and maybe something happens, and your voice starts taking...
View ArticleMolly Antopol on Grace Paley
Because politics feel like an essential part of the makeup of her characters, I never feel like Paley’s being preachy; in “Wants,” the narrator wants to do all this organizing, and she’s upset with the...
View ArticleAndre Dubus III on process
There’s a profound difference between making something up and imagining it. You’re making something up when you think out a scene. You think, “I need this to happen so some other thing can happen.”...
View ArticleAndre Dubus on risk
William Stafford, the poet, taught me “The poet must put himself in a state of receptivity before writing.” Stafford said you know you’re being receptive when a) you’re willing to accept anything that...
View ArticleDorthe Nors on Bergman
He lived on a small island called Faro, north of Gotland, where he would plan his films, write the scripts, make the screenboards, and everything. He limited his activities: Besides working and...
View ArticleFaulkner says
Faulkner: At one time I thought the most important thing was talent. I think now that the young man or the young woman must possess or teach himself, train himself, in infinite patience, which is to...
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buy anything
I’ve decided to became a McSweeney’s subscriber again. The issues leading up to Issue 50 sound like doozies. I’ve wondered how they make such unique objects so affordably, but maybe that is why they...
View Articlepain in someone else’s body
I don’t know why I bother writing anything any more. There’s always a Solnit quote that does it. After writing that last post, I came upon a section in The Faraway Nearby that deals with the notion of...
View Articlemoney separates
The anthropologist David Graeber points out that the explanation that we invented money because barter was too clumsy is false… Before money, people didn’t barter but gave and received as goods ebbed...
View ArticleChris Adrian says
As much as I like to spend time in the extended Smurf village of my imagination, there’s something nice about getting to go to a day job where there are concrete expectations of you and concrete things...
View ArticleGrimm’s tale
Clever Hans is a fairy tale collected by the Brothers Grimm about a boy who ruins his engagement with a girl through a variety of comedic events. In each instance, Hans mishandled the gifts. He sticks...
View ArticleM. NoursbeSe Philip says
Law and poetry both share an inexorable concern with language – the “right” use of the “right” words, phrases, or even marks of punctuation; precision of expression is the goal shared by both. In the...
View ArticleSontag says: exotics
Generally, the grievously injured bodies shown in published photographs are from Asia or Africa. This journalistic custom inherits the centuries-old practice of exhibiting exotic – that is, colonized –...
View ArticleSontag says: no surprises
To designate a hell is not to tell us anything about how to extract people from that hell, how to moderate hell’s flames. Still, it seems a good in itself to acknowledge, to have enlarged, one’s sense...
View ArticleSontag says: sympathy is not enough
People can turn off not just because a steady diet of images of violence has made them indifferent but because they are afraid. It is because, say, the war in Bosnia didn’t stop, because leaders...
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