Things I’ve read and liked the last week or so.
- The Mire (Becky Cloonan)
- Scalped Vol. 1: Indian Country (Jason Aaron and R.M. Guera)
- Svavelvinter & Slaktare Små (Erik Granström)
- Unknown Soldier Vol. 1: Haunted House (Joshua Dysart and Alberto Ponticelli)
And then I’m rereading Grant Morrison’s Doom Patrol too. Lots of comics.
Source: shinodita
Got some book loot today: Paul Murray’s Skippy Dies and the three Principles and Practices books of Will Eisner. These made me happy on a day where things otherwise didn’t make much sense.
Can someone give me a hamburger and some french fries? Please?
Go books from Gwyn, just in time for the weekend trip too! This is also mixed with anxiety due to, as far as I know, the birthday gift to Andrea is still lost in transition. Mail should be just as fast in both directions, right? At least I think so. Perhaps it’s stolen by a thief, or classified as dangerous and awaiting FBI experts. I hope not, hope it’s just misplaced.
Anyways. Things to read!
She was passionate about what children want and deserve from their literature. Adults would approach her at signings, wanting to know why she wrote such difficult books. In one case, when a woman protested, the woman’s young son spoke up and assured Diana, “Don’t worry. I understood it.” She believed in the flexiblility of her readers’ minds, their willingness to puzzle things out, and to wait for clues to anything they couldn’t yet puzzle. She gave her readers books like Fire and Hemlock, Time of the Ghost, Archer’s Goon, Black Maria, and Dogsbody, and knew they’d chase the themes and meanings and resonances until they caught them.
Source: tor.com
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck. So the cancer was there and now Diana Wynne Jones has died. Fuck. I do not like this at all.
I’m reading Live From New York and I came to this said by Bernie Brillstein.
[Michael] O’Donoghue had the best line about the Muppets. He used to say, “I won’t write for felt.”
And all I could think was what a sad disposition O’Donoghue had. Sure, it must have been frustrating to having to go to Jim Henson just to have the writing cleared, but at the end Jim was far weirder than any of the SNL writers. And of course I love Muppets so I’m a bit biased.
BLDGBLOG: Unsolving the City: An Interview with China Miéville
I wish I had met China Miéville a few years later when my fascinations (or obsession you might call it) about cities had started. This interview is second best.
bendyroad replied to your post:Tried synchronised floor swimming. It was a huge…
Have you been reading Miranda July? She has a story about floor swimming.
That I have not. Have not read much by her at all, been meaning to for ages but I’m kind of slow sometimes. Not to mention that I get that glazed look in my eyes and always buy more books at the same time as I forget half the stuff I was there to buy in the first place. (This applies to online book shops as well.)
Just as Chelsey, I don’t reblog those reblog memes. It gets too messy too quick. But I can’t ignore the first line from favourite book thing. I just can’t. But one favourite book? One?! That’s insane. There are several, there has to be several. So here’s a few of mine.
Gormenghast, that is, the main massing of the original stone, taken by itself would have displayed a certain ponderous architectural quality were it possible to have ignored the circumfusion of those mean dwellings that swarmed like an epidemic around its outer walls.
Two days ago I decided to kill myself.
The young captain’s hands were sticky with blood on the steering wheel as he cautiously backed the jeep in a tight turn off the rutted mud track onto a patch of level snow that shone in the intermittent moonlight on the edge of the gorge, and then his left hand seemed to freeze onto the gear-shift knob after he reached down to clank the lever upinto first gear.
Having placed in my mouth sufficient bread for three minutes’ chewing, I withdrew my powers of sensual perception and retired into the privacy of my mind, my eyes and face assuming a vacant and preoccupied expression.
“It was my first Friday night in LA,” Laurie says in her press kit for the album.
There were angels in the glass, two four six many of them, each one shuffling into his place in line like an alderman at the Lord Mayor’s show.
By day, the Nicollet Mall winds through Minneapolis like a caved canal.
Does such a thing as ‘the fatal flaw,’ that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature?
Shortly after the captain mentioned they were passing over Stornaway, that it was 45 degrees below zero outside, that they were at a height of 36,000 feet, that the weather in London was cloudy and drizzly and a good morning to all, he warned that due to a high-pressure cell over Great Britain it might be a little turbulent for the next hour or so, and after signing off—Buck, Chip, Dirk, Biff, whatever his name was, to Lucy he sounded drunk or at best half-awake—the little seatbelt sign lit up with a ding.
Veldt to scrub to fields to farms to these first tumbling houses that rise from the earth.
From the Times July 26, 1849
The yearly budget and planning proposal is called THE MASTER PLAN.
Call me batshit insane, but I want that book. Or a facsimile with the same title and cover design but with better contents. I’d do the laugh bit though, the maniac laughter is mandatory.
For the class in digital illustration we were given the assignment of doing a cover for a children’s book based on something from our past. This is what I did, and no, the monster is a metaphor for… I don’t know, but it’s a good monster as opposed to the bad ones.
I love this cover to the Avram Davidson Treasury. Love the short stories within too, but this cover is really against most principles of what makes a good one. And yet, and yet, it is perfect for this book. Hardly anyone read him, sadly, and those who did would pick this one up on the strength of content alone. This content is also what makes it hard to do something else. It’s in the words, and some flashy colour splashes would only subtract from that, there’s no way of giving all of their varieties away on the cover.
A while ago Meaghano answered one of my questions:
Ha, and no, no custom dust jackets. I HATE DUST JACKETS. I have taken dust jackets off, I’ll tell you that. But it sort of feels like a betrayal to hide what book you’re reading. It’s like you have to earn the right to read it by owning up to the fact that you’re reading it. But i am Catholic so keep that in mind.
I’ve been thinking about the dust covers a bit since then. Dust jackets are kind of annoying and impossible not to throw on the drawers when you read a book. But! I also quite like the idea of having an author with a unified spine design in the bookshelf. Especially when they span over a few different publishing houses like Jonathan Lethem. I want to be able to look at a shelf and see where the authors are without having to know.
So yes, I’m thinking good paper stock, a ruler and illustrator. You think this is sad? Fuck you, I take my bookshelves seriously. If I could, I’d bend the room in more dimensions in order to get more walls to cover up with books.
Source: meaghano.com
