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You can lead the I‑generation to a bookstore, but can you make them read?
Perhaps, especially if the volume has an eye-catching cover image that bleeds off the edge.
If nothing else, they can be enlisted to provide some stunning free publicity for the titles that appeal to their highly visual sense of creative play. (An author’s dream!)
France’s first indie bookstore, Bordeaux’s Librairie Mollat, is reeling ‘em in with Book Face, an irresistible selfie challenge that harkens back to DJ Carl Morris’ Sleeveface project, in which one or more people are photographed “obscuring or augmenting any part of their body or bodies with record sleeve(s), causing an illusion.”
The results are proliferating on the store’s Instagram, as fetching young things (and others) apply themselves to finding the best angles and costumes for their lit-based Trompe‑l’œil masterstrokes.
…even the ones that don’t quite pass the forced perspective test have the capacity to charm.
…and not every shot requires intense pre-production and precision placement.
Hopefully, we’ll see more kids getting into the act soon. In fact, if some youngsters of your acquaintance are expressing a bit of boredom with their vacances d’été, try turning them loose in your local bookstore to identify a likely candidate for a Book Face of their own.
(Remember to support the bookseller with a purchase!)
Back stateside, some librarians shared their pro tips for achieving Book Face success in this 2015 New York Times article. The New York Public Library’s Morgan Holzer also cites Sleeveface as the inspiration behind #BookfaceFriday, the hashtag she coined in hopes that other libraries would follow suit.
Ayun Halliday is an author, illustrator, theater maker and Chief Primatologist of the East Village Inky zine. In honor of her son’s 18th birthday, she invites you to Book Face your baby using The Big Rumpus, her first book, for which he served as cover model. Follow her @AyunHalliday.
Why keep a dream journal? There’s probably amusing befuddlement and even a kind of roundabout enlightenment to be had in looking back over one’s subconscious visions, so vivid during the night, that vanish so soon after waking. But now we have another, more compelling reason to write down our dreams: Vladimir Nabokov did it. This we know from the recently published Insomniac Dreams, a collection of the entries from the Lolitaand Pale Fireauthor’s dream journal — written, true to his compositional method, on index cards— edited and contextualized by Nabokov scholar Gennady Barabtarlo.
“On October 14, 1964, in a grand Swiss hotel in Montreux where he had been living for three years, Vladimir Nabokov started a private experiment that lasted till January 3 of the following year, just before his wife’s birthday (he had engaged her to join him in the experiment and they compared notes),” writes Barabtarlo in the book’s first chapter, which you can read online. “Every morning, immediately upon awakening, he would write down what he could rescue of his dreams. During the following day or two he was on the lookout for anything that seemed to do with the recorded dream.”
He wanted to “test a theory according to which dreams can be precognitive as well as related to the past. That theory is based on the premise that images and situations in our dreams are not merely kaleidoscoping shards, jumbled, and mislabeled fragments of past impressions, but may also be a proleptic view of an event to come.” That notion, writes Dan Piepenbring at the New Yorker, “came from J. W. Dunne, a British engineer and armchair philosopher who, in 1927, published An Experiment with Time, arguing, in part, that our dreams afforded us rare access to a higher order of time.” The book’s fan base included such other literary notables as James Joyce, T.S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley.
Nabokov had his own take on Dunne’s theory: “The waking event resembling or coinciding with the dream event does so not because the latter is a prophecy,” he writes on the first notecard in the stack produced by his own three-month experiment with time, “but because this would be the kind of dream that one might expect to have after the event.” But Nabokov’s dream data seem to have provided little in the way in absolute proof of what he called “reverse memory.” In the strongest example, a dream about eating soil samples at a museum precedes his real-life viewing of a television documentary about the soil of Senegal. And as Barabtarlo points out, the dream “distinctly and closely followed two scenes” of a short story Nabokov had written 25 years before.
And so we come to the real appeal of Insomniac Dreams: Nabokov’s skill at rendering evocative and memorable images in language — or rather, in his polyglot case, languages – as well as dealing with themes of time and memory. You can read a few samples at Lithub involving not just soil but sexual jealousy, a lecture hastily scrawled minutes before class time, the Red Army, and “a death-sign consisting of two roundish golden-yellow blobs with blurred edges.” They may bring to mind the words of the narrator of Ada, the novel Nabokov published the following year, who in his own consideration of Dunne guesses that in dreams, “some law of logic should fix the number of coincidences, in a given domain, after which they cease to be coincidences, and form, instead, the living organism of a new truth.”
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
We remember Catch-22, more than half a century after its publication, as a rollicking satire of American military culture in wartime. But those of us who return to Joseph Heller’s debut novel, a cult favorite turned bestseller turned pillar of the modern canon, find a much more complex piece of work. Heller began writing the manuscript in 1953, while still employed as a copywriter at a small advertising agency. The project grew in ambition over the next eight years he spent working on it, eventually in collaboration with editor Robert Gottlieb and its other advocates at Simon & Schuster, the publisher that had bought it.
When Catch-22 finally went into print, one of those advocates, an advertising manager named Nina Bourne, launched an aggressive one-woman campaign to get copies into the hands of all the influential readers of the day. “You are mistaken in calling it a novel,” replied Evelyn Waugh. “It is a collection of sketches — often repetitious — totally without structure.” But the book’s apparently free-form narrative, full of and often turning on puns and seemingly far-fetched associations, had actually come as the product of a deceptive compositional rigor. As one piece of evidence we have Heller’s handwritten outline above. (You can also find a more easily legible version here.)
The outline’s grid presents the events of the story in chronological order, as the novel itself certainly doesn’t. The rows of its vertical axis run from early 1944 at the top to December 1944 at the bottom, and the columns of its horizontal axis lists the book’s major characters. They include the protagonist John Yossarian, Air Force bombardier; the “poor and rustic” Orr; Colonel Cathcart, a “Harvard graduate with a cigarette holder,” and Major Major, who “looks like Henry Fonda.” Within this matrix Heller kept track of what should happen to which characters when, at the time of which events of the real war.
The descriptions of events sketched on the outline range from the broadly comic (“Chaplain spies Yossarian naked in a tree and thinks it is a mystical vision”) to the cynical (“Milo justifies bombing the squadron in terms of free enterprise and the large profit he has made”) to the straightforwardly brutal (“Snowden is shot through the middle and dies”). Their placement together in the same neutral space reflects the single quality that, perhaps more than any other, brought upon the novel such a wide range of reactions and earned it a lasting place in not just American literature but American culture. Look at all the aspects of war straight on, it reminds us still today, and the total picture — bloody and senseless for the individual participant, though not without its minor triumphs and laughs — looks something like absurdist art.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Whatever historians have to say about his political legacy, Barack Obama will be remembered as charming, diplomatic, thoughtful, and very well-read. He honed these personal qualities not only as a politician but as a scholar, writer, and teacher, roles that require intellectual curiosity and openness to other points of view. The former president was something of a dream come true for teachers and librarians, who could point to him as a shining example of a world leader who loves to read, talk about books, and share books with others. All kinds of books: from novels and poetry to biography, philosophy, sociology, and political and scientific nonfiction; books for children and books for young adults.
It is refreshing to look back at his tenure as a reliable recommender of quality books during his eight years in office. (See every book he recommended during his two terms here.) Reading gave him the ability to “slow down and get perspective,” he told Michiko Kakutani last year. He hoped to use his office, he said, “to widen the audience for good books. At a time when so much of our politics is trying to manage this clash of cultures brought about by globalization and technology and migration, the role of stories to unify—as opposed to divide, to engage rather than to marginalize—is more important than ever.”
While many people have been hoping he would weigh in on deeply disturbing current events, he “has been relatively quiet on social media of late,” notes Thu-Huong Ha at Quartz. But he has continued to use his platform to recommend good books, suggesting that the perspectives we gain from reading are as critical as ever. “In a Facebook post published on Saturday, Obama recommended some of the nonfiction he’s read recently, focused on government, inequality, and history, with one book that addresses immigration. Together the recommendations are an intellectual antidote to the current US president, who eschews reading,” says Ha.
The list below includes Obama’s brief commentary on each book and article.
Journalist Alex Wagner investigates a potential new twist in her family’s history. “What she came up with,” Obama writes, “is a thoughtful, beautiful meditation on what makes us who we are—the search for harmony between our own individual identities and the values and ideals that bind us together as Americans.”
Economist Enrico Moretti argues that there are three Americas: brain-hub cities like Austin and Boston; cities once dominated by traditional manufacturing; and the cities in between. “Still a timely and smart discussion of how different cities and regions have made a changing economy work for them,” writes Obama, “and how policymakers can learn from that to lift the circumstances of working Americans everywhere.”
Political scientist Patrick J. Deneen argues that liberalism is not the result of the natural state of politics and lays out the ideology’s inherent contradictions. “In a time of growing inequality, accelerating change, and increasing disillusionment with the liberal democratic order we’ve known for the past few centuries,” says the former president, “I found this book thought-provoking.”
In The Atlantic, Matthew Stewart, author of The Management Myth, defines a “cognitive elite,” a “9.9%” of Americans who value meritocracy and, he argues, are complicit in the erosion of democracy. “Another thought-provoking analysis, this one about how economic inequality in America isn’t just growing, but self-reinforcing,” says Obama.
Mitch Landrieu, the former mayor of New Orleans, Louisiana, writes in his memoir of the personal history and reckoning with race that led him to take down four Confederate statues in 2017. “It’s an ultimately optimistic take from someone who believes the South will rise again not by reasserting the past, but by transcending it,” writes Obama.
This report for the nonprofit RAND Corporation, available as a free ebook, attempts to study the erosion of fact-based policy making and discourse in the US. “A look at how a selective sorting of facts and evidence isn’t just dishonest, but self-defeating,” says Obama.
While the former president no longer has the power to sway policy, he can still inspire millions of people to read—essential for staying balanced, informed, and reflective in our perilous times.
We think of David Lynch as a filmmaker, and rightly so, but the director of Eraserhead, Blue Velvet, and Mulholland Drive has long kept a more diverse creative portfolio. He began as a painter, studying at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and has also tried his hand at photography, music, and comic strips. More recently, writes the AV Club’s Randall Colburn, “Lynch has also released his own line of coffee, collaborated on Twin Peaks-themed beer and skateboards, and created his own festival. His latest endeavor? T‑shirts, which is wild because it’s hard to imagine the ever-dapper filmmaker ever wearing one.”
Perhaps a line of Lynch-approved traditional white shirts, made to be buttoned all the way up even without a tie, remains in development. But for now, fans choose from the 57 T‑shirts designs now available at Studio: David Lynch’s Amazon store. All suitable for wearing to your local revival house, they include “Turkey Cheese Head,”“Cowboy,”“Small Dog,”“Small Barking Dog,“and “You Gotta Be Kiddin’ Me.” What kind of life, now solidly into its eighth decade, has both enabled and driven Lynch to make not just so many things, but so many Lynchian things? Perhaps we can find a few answers within the nearly 600 pages of Room to Dream, Lynch’s new memoir.
“Fans who share Lynch’s pleasure in mystery will approach this book anxiously, hoping that his secrets may somehow be both revealed and sustained,” writes the Washington Post’s Charles Arrowsmith of the book, an excerpt of which you can hear read by Lynch himself above. (He begins by saying “I’m going to tell you a story about my grandparents” and ends with the image of his young self vomiting into a helmet he’d brought to school for show-and-tell.) And those who fear that the conventionality of the memoir form might flatten out Lynch’s idiosyncrasies can rest assured that “in telling his life story, Lynch demonstrates the same disregard for causality and tonal consistency that marks his films.”
Despite including not just Lynch’s perspective but the perspectives of many others (“surprisingly candid ex-wives, family members, actors, agents, musicians, and colleagues in various fields,” proclaims the jacket copy), “Room to Dream pulls off a neat trick in drawing back a curtain and revealing relatively little. Despite the book’s heft, there’s not much to explicate the mysteries of Lynch’s work. But then, for him, the mystery’s the thing. To explain would be to destroy. What we get instead is insight into his creative process.” As dedicated Lynch enthusiasts understand, the creative process, which throughout his career has led him not to answers but ever more strangely compelling questions, is everything.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
Sigmund Freud died in 1939, and the nearly eight decades since haven’t been kind to his psychoanalytical theories, but in some sense he survives. “For many years, even as writers were discarding the more patently absurd elements of his theory — penis envy, or the death drive — they continued to pay homage to Freud’s unblinking insight into the human condition,” writes the New Yorker’s Louis Menand. He claims that Freud thus evolved, “in the popular imagination, from a scientist into a kind of poet of the mind. And the thing about poets is that they cannot be refuted. No one asks of ‘Paradise Lost’: But is it true? Freud and his concepts, now converted into metaphors, joined the legion of the undead.”
The master of a legion of undead psychological metaphors — who, in the ranks of living illustrators, could be more suited to render such a figure than Ralph Steadman? And how many of us know that he actually did so in 1979, when he produced an “art-biography” of the “Father of Psychoanalysis”?
Sigmund Freud, which has spent long stretches out of print since its first publication, tells the story of Freud’s life, beginning with his childhood in Austria to his death, not long after his emigration in flight from the Nazis, in London. It was there that he met Virginia Woolf, who in her diary describes him as “a screwed up shrunk very old man: with a monkey’s light eyes, paralyzed spasmodic movements, inarticulate: but alert.”
There, again, Freud sounds like one of Steadman’s drawings, sometimes outwardly unappealing but always possessed of an unignorable vitality generated by a solid core of perceptiveness. Earlier chapters of Freud’s life, characterized by intellectual as well as physical vigorousness aided by the 19th-century “miracle drug” of cocaine, also give the illustrator rich material to work with. One can’t help but think of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, which forged a permanent cultural link between Steadman’s art and Hunter S. Thompson’s prose. How “true” is the drug-fueled desert odyssey that book recounts? More so, perhaps, than many of Freud’s supposedly scientific discoveries. But as with the work of Freud, so with that of Thompson and Steadman: we return to it not because we want the truth, exactly, but because we can’t turn away from the often grotesque versions of ourselves it shows us.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
If you’ve lived in or visited New York City, you must know the laughable futility of trying to “do the Met” in a day, or even a weekend. Not only is the museum enormous, but its permanent collections demand to be studied in detail, an activity one cannot rush through with any satisfaction. If you’re headed there for a special exhibit, be especially disciplined—make a beeline and do not stop to linger over elaborate Edo-period samurai armor or austere Shaker-made furniture.
I thought I’d learned my lesson after many years of residence in the city. When I returned last summer for a visit, family in tow, I vowed to head straight for the Rei Kawakubo exhibit, listing all other priorities beneath it. More fool me.
Immediate overwhelm overtook as we entered, on a weekend, in a crush of tourist noise. After hours spent admiring sarcophagi, neoclassical paintings, etc., etc., we had to nix the exhibit and push our way into Central Park for fresh air and recuperative ice cream.
Does an exhibition checklist, with photographs and descriptions of every piece on display, make up for missing the Kawakubo in person? Not exactly, but at least I can linger over it, virtually, in solitude and at my leisure. If you value this experience, cannot make it to the Met, or want to see several hundred past exhibitions from the comfort of your home, you can do so easily thanks to the wealth of catalogs the Met has uploaded to its Digital Collections.
These catalogs document special exhibits not only at the New York landmark, but also at galleries around the world from the past 100 years or so. In a recent blog post, the Met points to one such scanned catalog—out of almost a hundred from the Hungarian Gallery Nemzeti Szalon—from a 1957 exhibition of sculptor Miklós Borsos. The text is in Hungarian, but the artwork (further up), in detailed black and white photographs, speaks a universal visual language.
These catalogs join the thousands of books—50,000 titles in all—at the Met’s Digital Collections. There, you’ll find collections such as Rare Books Published in Imperial and Early Soviet Russia, with unusual treasures like the book Churches of Uglich, a survey of one Russian town’s churches, with photos, from the 1880s. “Interested in Dada?” asks the Met, and who isn’t? The museum has just added a 1917 issue of journal The Blind Man, edited by Marcel Duchamp and containing Alfred Stieglitz’s photograph of Duchamp’s found art prank Fountain.
If you’re headed to the Met to see one of these special exhibits, take my advice and don’t get distracted once you’re inside. But if you want to access a range of the museum’s cultural treasures from afar, you can’t do any better than browsing its Digital Collections, where you’re also likely to get lost for hours, maybe days.
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