The first rule of Horsing Around Club is: You do not talk about Horsing Around Club. ― Chuck Palahniuk, Fight Club for Kids
Retooling a popular show, film, or comic to feature younger versions of the characters, their personalities and relationships virtually unchanged, can be a serious, if cynical source of income for the original creators.
Perhaps because spin-off babies are designed to gently ensnare a new and younger audience, and Palahniuk, whose 2002 novel Lullaby hinged on a nursery rhyme that kills children in their cribs, is unlikely to file down the dark, twisted edges that have won him a cult following.
The same spirit of mischief drives Fight Club for Kids, which mercifully will not be hitting the children’s section of your local bookstore in time for the upcoming holiday season (or ever).
Much like Tyler Durden, Palahniuk’s most infamous creation, this title is but a figment, existing only in the above video, where it is read by its putative author.
If you think Samuel L. Jackson’s narration of Go the F**k to Sleep—which can actually be purchased in book form—represents the height of adult readers running off the rails, you ain’t heard nothing yet:
The horseplay would go on until it was done
And everyone who did it would always have fun
Especially the Boy Who Had No Name
Who once just, like, beat this dude, who was actually Jared Leto in the movie, which was so fuckin’ cool and intense, and he’s just pummeling this guy and of course, being Jared Leto, he was essentially a model, but when our guy is done with him, he’s just this purple, bloated, chewed up bubblegum-looking motherfucker covered in blood, head to toe!
(The second rule of Horsing Around Club is: You DO NOT TALK ABOUT HORSING AROUND CLUB!)
Find more printable Chuck Palahniuk coloring pages here.
If you don’t much care for modern medicine, entire industries have arisen to provide you with more “alternative” or “natural” varieties of remedies, mostly involving the consumption of plants. Publishers have put out guides to their use by the dozens. In a way, those books have a place in a long tradition, stretching back to a time well before modern medicine existed as something to be an alternative to. Just recently, the British Library digitized the oldest such volume, a thousand-year-old illuminated manuscript known as the Cotton MS Vitellius C III. The book, writes the British Library’s Alison Hudson, “is the only surviving illustrated Old English herbal, or book describing plants and their uses.” (The sole condition note: “leaves damaged by fire in 1731.”)
The manuscript’s Old English is actually the translation of “a text which used to be attributed to a 4th-century writer known as Pseudo-Apuleius, now recognized as several different Late Antique authors whose texts were subsequently combined.” It also includes “translations of Late Antique texts on the medicinal properties of badgers” and another text “on medicines derived from parts of four-legged animals.”
(Somehow one doesn’t imagine those latter sections playing quite as well with today’s alternative-medicine market.) Each entry about a plant or animal features “its name in various languages; descriptions of ailments it can be used to treat; and instructions for finding and preparing it.”
Quite a few of the species with which the guide deals would have been directly known to few or no Anglo-Saxons in those days, and some of the entries, such as the one describing dragonswort as ideally “grown in dragon’s blood,” seem more fanciful than others. As with many a Medieval work, the book freely mixes fact and lore: to pick the mandrake root (pictured at the top of the post), “said to shine at night and to flee from impure persons,” the guide recommends “an iron tool (to dig around it), an ivory staff (to dig the plant itself up), a dog (to help you pull it out), and quick reflexes.” You can behold these and other pages of the Cotton MS Vitellius C III in zoomable high resolution at the British Library’s online manuscript viewer. While the remedies themselves might never have been particularly effective, their accompanying illustrations do remain strange and amusing even a millennium later — and isn’t laughter supposed to be the best medicine?
As a novelist, George Orwell did not traffic in subtleties, but then neither did the authors of Medieval morality plays. The allegorical Animal Farm performs a similar, if secular, function, giving us unambiguous villainy and clear didactic intent. Orwell noted in his essay “Why I Write” that he meant the book to “fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.“ Originally published with the subtitle A Fairy Story, the novel caricatures Stalinism and the Russian Revolution, and Orwell left no mystery as to his intent when he commented in the preface to a 1947 Ukrainian edition that he meant the book to “end on a loud note of discord” meant to signify what he saw as the instability of the Tehran Conference.
Leaden statements like these aside, Orwell swore he “did not wish to comment on the work,” writing, “if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure.” The book does indeed speak, in two particular ways: its vividly grotesque characterizations of the humans and animals on the farm and its indelible collection of propagandistic slogans.
These are the features best captured by gonzo illustrator Ralph Steadman, famous for his collaborations with Hunter S. Thompson. Published in 1995—with the Fairy Story subtitle restored—the Steadman-illustrated 50th anniversary edition realizes another previous variation on the book’s title: Animal Farm: A Contemporary Satire.
These images draw out the exaggerated absurdities of the novel as only an artist with Steadman’s twisted, surrealist sense of visual humor could. They are profoundly effective, though there’s no telling what Orwell would have thought of them. Steadman’s caricatures universalize the book’s drama, providing the kind of stock characters we find in folklore, “fairy stories,” and religious allegory. But Orwell wrote that he wished us not to mistake his express political intent: “It was of the utmost importance to me that people in Western Europe should see the Soviet regime for what it really was…. I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.”
Steadman, to his great credit, felt no need to literalize Orwell’s stated intentions in his illustrations, but rather took the book’s bizarre world on its own terms. You can read more quotes from Orwell’s earnest, intended preface for the book, restored in the Steadman edition, at Brain Pickings, where you’ll also find a good number of the illustrations as well. Copies of the book can be purchased on Amazon.
Steadman not only applied his skill as a caricaturist to Orwell’s fictional farm denizens, we should note, but also to the author himself. He made several sketches of Orwell, such as that below of the writer with a cage of rats around his neck. You can see several more of Steadman’s drawings of Orwell at The Guardian.
Graphic and motion designer Henning M. Lederer surfs that wave on the most unexpected of boards—a collection of abstract mid-century covers drawn from the Instagram feed of artist Julian Montague, who shares his enthusiasm for vintage minimalism.
His latest effort, above, continues his explorations in the subjects which most frequently traded in these sorts of geometric covers—science, psychotherapy, philosophy and sociology.
No word on what inspired him to toss in the first cover, which features a cheerful, Playmobil-esque mushroom gatherer. It’s endearing, but—to quote Sesame Street—is not like the others. Those of us who can’t decipher Cyrillic script get the fun of imagining what sort of text this is—a mycology manual? A children’s tale? A psychological examination—and ultimately rejection—of midcentury publishers’ fascination for spirals, diagonal bars, and other non-narrative graphics?
Whether or not you’d be inclined to pick up any of these titles, you may find yourself wanting to dance to them, compliments of musician Jörg Stierle’s trippy electronics.
Even those of us who’ve never read Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451know it as a searing indictment of government censorship. Or at least we think we know it, and besides, what else could the story of a dystopian future where America has outlawed books whose main character burns the few remaining, secreted-away volumes to earn his living be about? It turns out that Bradbury himself had other ideas about the meaning of his best-known novel, and in the last years of his life he tried publicly to correct the prevailing interpretation — and to his mind, the incorrect one.
“Fahrenheit 451 is not, he says firmly, a story about government censorship,” wrote the Los Angeles Weekly’s Amy E. Boyle Johnson in 2007. “Nor was it a response to Senator Joseph McCarthy, whose investigations had already instilled fear and stifled the creativity of thousands.” Rather, he meant his 1953 novel as “a story about how television destroys interest in reading literature.” It’s about, as he puts it above, people “being turned into morons by TV.” Johnson quotes Bradbury describing television as a medium that “gives you the dates of Napoleon, but not who he was,” spreading “factoids” instead of knowledge. “They stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full.”
He didn’t much like radio either: just two years before Fahrenheit 451, Bradbury wrote to his sci-fi colleague Richard Matheson bemoaning its contribution to “our growing lack of attention,” and its creation of a “hopscotching existence” that “makes it almost impossible for people, myself included, to sit down and get into a novel again.” For the abandonment of reading he saw in society, and from which he extrapolated in his book, he blamed not the state but the people, an entertaiment-as-opiate-addicted “democratic society whose diverse population turns against books: Whites reject Uncle Tom’s Cabin and blacks disapprove of Little Black Sambo,” leading to widespread censorship and eventually the burning of all reading material.
But books still do face challenges (and the FBI even had its eye on Bradbury and his genre), challenges only an intelligent, non-numbed public can beat back. “I get letters from teachers all the time saying my books have been banned temporarily,” says Bradbury in the clip above. “I say, don’t worry about it, put ’em back on the shelves. You keep putting them back and they keep taking them off, and you finally win.” The authors, even Bradbury, can’t help, but he would always tell these literarily-minded people who wrote to him in distress the same thing: “You do the job. You’re the librarian. You’re the teacher. Stand firm and you’ll win. And they always do.”
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Apocalypses have always been popular as mass belief and entertainment. Maybe it’s a collective desire for retribution or redemption, or a kind of vertigo humans experience when staring into the abyss of the unknown. Better to end it all than live in neurotic uncertainty. Maybe we find it impossible to think of a future world existing hundreds, thousands, millions of years after our deaths. As Rebecca Solnit observes in Hope in the Dark: Untold Histories, Wild Possibilities, “people have always been good at imagining the end of the world, which is much easier to picture than the strange sidelong paths of change in a world without end.” What if the world never ends, but goes on forever, changing and evolving in unimaginable ways?
This is the bailiwick of science fiction, but also the domain of history, a hindsight view of centuries past when wars, tyrannical conquests, famines, and diseases nearly wiped out entire populations—when it seemed to them a near certainty that nothing would or could survive the present horror. And yet it did.
This may be no consolation to the victims of violence and plague, but the world has gone on for the living, people have adapted and survived, even under the current, very real threats of nuclear war and catastrophic climate change. And throughout history, both small and large groups of people have changed the world for the better, though it hardly seemed possible at the time. Solnit’s book chronicles these histories, and last year, she released a playlist as a companion for the book.
Hope in the Dark makes good on its title through a collection of essays about “everything,” writes Alice Gregory at The New York Times, “from the Zapatistas to weather forecasting to the fall of the Berlin Wall.” The book is “part history of progressive success stories, part extended argument for hope as a catalyst for action.” Solnit wrote the book in 2004, during the reelection of George W. Bush—a time when progressives despaired of ever seeing the end of chickenhawk sabre-rattling, wars for profit, privatization of the public sphere, environmental degradation, theocratic political projects, curtailing of civil rights, or the disaster capitalism the administration wholeheartedly embraced (as Naomi Klein’s The Shock Doctrine detailed). Plus ça change.…
In March of last year, Haymarket Books reissued Hope in the Dark, and on November 10th, Solnit posted a link to a free download of the book on Facebook. It was downloaded over 30,000 times in one week. Along with other progressive intellectuals like Klein and Richard Rorty, Solnit—who became internationally known for the term “mansplaining” in her essay, then book, Men Explain Things to Me—has now been cast as a “Cassandra figure of the left,” Gregory writes. But she rejects the disastrous futility inherent in that analogy:
If you think of a kind of ecology of ideas, there are more than enough people telling us how horrific and terrible and bad everything is, and I don’t really need to join that project. There’s a whole other project of trying to counterbalance that — sometimes we do win and this is how it worked in the past. Change is often unpredictable and indirect. We don’t know the future. We’ve changed the world many times, and remembering that, that history, is really a source of power to continue and it doesn’t get talked about nearly enough.
If we don’t hear enough talk about hope, maybe we need to hear more hopeful music, Solnit suggests in her Hope in the Dark playlist. Thirteen songs long, it moves between Beyoncé and The Clash, Iggy Pop and Stevie Nicks, Black Flag and Big Freedia.
While the selections speak for themselves, she offers brief commentary on each of her choices in a post at Powell’s. Beyoncé’s “Formation,” Solnit writes, “reformulates, digging deep into the past of sorrow and suffering and injustice and pulling us all with her into a future that could be different.” Patti Smith’s anthem “People Have the Power” feels like hope, Solnit says: “it’s right about the power we have, which obliges us to act, and which many duck by pretending we’re helpless.” Maybe that’s what apocalypses are all about—making us feel small and powerless in the face of impending doom. But there are other kinds of religion, like that of Lee Williams’ “Steal My Joy.” It’s a “gorgeous gospel song,” writes Solnit. “Joystealers are everywhere. Never surrender to them.” That sounds like an ideal exhortation to imagine and fight for a better future.
If your Facebook news feed looks anything like mine, you wake up each morning to a stream of not just food snapshots and selfies but pictures of books, whether stacked up, dumped into a pile, or arranged neatly on shelves. Why do we post digital photos of our printed matter? Almost certainly for the same reason we do anything on social media: to send a message about ourselves. We want to tell our friends who we are, or who we think we are, but not in so many words, or rather not in so few; a few of the books we’ve read (or intend to read), carefully selected and arranged, does the job. But what if, instead of assembling a self-portrait through books, someone else entered your personal library and did it for you?
Artist Nina Katchadourian (she of, among many other endeavors, the airplane-bathroom 17th-century Flemish portraiture) recently took on that task in the Lawrence, Kansas home of famously hard-living and furiously creative beat writer William S. Burroughs. She did it as part of her long-running Sorted Books project, in which, in her words, “I sort through a collection of books, pull particular titles, and eventually group the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence.
The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, often shown on the shelves of the library they came from. Taken as a whole, the clusters are a cross-section of that library’s holdings that reflect that particular library’s focus, idiosyncrasies, and inconsistencies.”
Kansas Cut-Up, the Burroughs chapter of Sorted Books, features such arrangements as How Did Sex Begin? / Uninvited Guests / Human Error, Memoirs of a Bastard Angel / A Night of Serious Drinking / A Little Original Sin, and American Diplomacy / Physical Interrogation Techniques / In the Secret State. Thom Robinson of the European Beat Studies Network describes Burroughs’ book collection as “a selection of largely European works whose contents include paranoia, theories of language, pseudoscience, mordant humour and drugs: in retrospect, it’s easy to imagine the owner of such an idiosyncratic library producing the melange of Naked Lunch. Perhaps for this reason, it seems hard to resist reordering the books which Burroughs owned in 1944 in order to emphasise the most recognisable elements of the later Burroughs persona.”
Sometimes Katchadourian seems to do just that and sometimes she doesn’t, but her method of book-sorting, which she explains in the episode of John and Sarah Green’s series The Art Assignment at the top of the post, bears more than a little resemblance to Burroughs’ own “cut-up” method of literary composition. “Take a page,” as Burroughs himself explained it. “Now cut down the middle and cross the middle. You have four sections: 1 2 3 4 … one two three four. Now rearrange the sections placing section four with section one and section two with section three. And you have a new page. Sometimes it says much the same thing. Sometimes something quite different.” And just as a rearranged book can speak in a new and strange voice, so can a rearranged library.
For more than eighty years, MIT Press has been publishing acclaimed titles in science, technology, art and architecture. Now, thanks to a new partnership between the Internet Archive and MIT Press, readers will be able to borrow these classics online for the first time. With generous support from Arcadia, a charitable fund of Peter Baldwin and Lisbet Rausing, this partnership represents an important advance in providing free, long-term public access to knowledge.
“These books represent some of the finest scholarship ever produced, but right now they are very hard to find,” said Brewster Kahle, founder and Digital Librarian of the Internet Archive. “Together with MIT Press, we will enable the patrons of every library that owns one of these books to borrow it online–one copy at a time.”
This joint initiative is a crucial early step in Internet Archive’s ambitious plans to digitize, preserve and provide public access to four million books, by partnering widely with university presses and other publishers, authors, and libraries.…
We will be scanning an initial group of 1,500 MIT Press titles at Internet Archive’s Boston Public Library facility, including Cyril Stanley Smith’s 1980 book, From Art to Science: Seventy-Two Objects Illustrating the Nature of Discovery, and Frederick Law Olmsted and Theodora Kimball’s Forty Years of Landscape Architecture: Central Park, which was published in 1973. The oldest title in the group is Arthur C. Hardy’s 1936 Handbook of Colorimetry.
Throughout the summer, we’ve been checking in, waiting for the first MIT Press books to hit Archive.org’s virtual shelves. They’re now starting to arrive. Click here to find the beginnings of what promises to be a much larger collection.
As Brewster Kahle (founder of Internet Archive) explained it to Library Journal, his organization is “basically trying to wave a wand over everyone’s physical collections and say, Blink! You now have an electronic version that you can use” in whatever way desired, assuming its permitted by copyright. In the case of MIT Press, it looks like you can log into Archive.org and digitally borrow their electronic texts for 14 days.
Archive.org hopes to digitize 1,500 MIT Press classics by the end of 2017. Digital collections from other publishing houses seem sure to follow.
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