The Books Samuel Beckett Read and Really Liked (1941–1956)

in Books, Literature | March 18th, 2015

becket list 1

Samuel Beck­ett, Pic, 1″ by Roger Pic. Via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons

Clad in a black turtle­neck and with a shock of white hair, Samuel Beck­ett was a gaunt, gloomy high priest of mod­ernism. After the 1955 pre­miere of Samuel Beckett’s play Wait­ing for Godot (watch him stage a per­for­mance here), Ken­neth Tynan quipped, ”It has no plot, no cli­max, no denoue­ment; no begin­ning, no mid­dle and no end.” From there, Beckett’s work only got more aus­tere, bleak and despair­ing. His 1969 play Breath, for instance, runs just a minute long and fea­tures just the sound of breath­ing.

An intense­ly pri­vate man, he man­aged to mes­mer­ize the pub­lic even as he turned away from the lime­light. When he won the Nobel Prize in 1969, his wife Suzanne, fear­ing the onslaught of fame that the award would bring, decried it as a “cat­a­stro­phe.”

A recent­ly pub­lished col­lec­tion of his let­ters from 1941–1956, the peri­od lead­ing up to his inter­na­tion­al suc­cess with his play Wait­ing for Godot, casts some light on at least one cor­ner of the man’s pri­vate life – what books were pil­ing up on his bed stand. Below is an anno­tat­ed list of what he was read­ing dur­ing that time. Not sur­pris­ing­ly, he real­ly dug Albert Camus’s The Stranger. “Try and read it,” he writes. “I think it is impor­tant.” He dis­miss­es Agatha Christie’s Crooked House as “very tired Christie” but prais­es Around the World in 80 Days, “It is live­ly stuff.” But the book he reserves the most praise for is J.D. Salinger’s Catch­er in the Rye. “I liked it very much indeed, more than any­thing for a long time.”

You can see the full list below. It was orig­i­nal­ly pub­lished online by Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press in 2011. Books with an aster­isk next to the title can be found in our col­lec­tion of 700 Free eBooks.

Andro­maque* by Jean Racine: “I read Andro­maque again with greater admi­ra­tion than ever and I think more under­stand­ing, at least more under­stand­ing of the chances of the the­atre today.”

Around the World in 80 Days* by Jules Verne: “It is live­ly stuff.”

The Cas­tle by Franz Kaf­ka: “I felt at home, too much so – per­haps that is what stopped me from read­ing on. Case closed there and then.”

The Catch­er in the Rye by J.D. Salinger: “I liked it very much indeed, more than any­thing for a long time.”

Crooked House by Agatha Christie: “very tired Christie”

Effi Briest* by Theodor Fontane: “I read it for the fourth time the oth­er day with the same old tears in the same old places.”

The Hunch­back of Notre Dame* by Vic­tor Hugo

Jour­ney to the End of the Night by Louis-Fer­di­nand Céline

Lautrea­mont and Sade by Mau­rice Blan­chot: “Some excel­lent ideas, or rather start­ing-points for ideas, and a fair bit of ver­biage, to be read quick­ly, not as a trans­la­tor does. What emerges from it though is a tru­ly gigan­tic Sade, jeal­ous of Satan and of his eter­nal tor­ments, and con­fronting nature more than with humankind.”

Man’s Fate by Andre Mal­raux

Mos­qui­toes by William Faulkn­er: “with a pref­ace by Que­neau that would make an ostrich puke”

The Stranger by Albert Camus: “Try and read it, I think it is impor­tant.”

The Temp­ta­tion to Exist by Emil Cio­ran: “Great stuff here and there. Must reread his first.”

La 628-E8* by Octave Mir­beau: “Damned good piece of work.”

via Cam­bridge Uni­ver­si­ty Press

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Samuel Beck­ett Directs His Absur­dist Play Wait­ing for Godot (1985)

Mon­ster­piece The­ater Presents Wait­ing for Elmo, Calls BS on Samuel Beck­ett

Rare Audio: Samuel Beck­ett Reads Two Poems From His Nov­el Watt

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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The Story of Lorem Ipsum: How Scrambled Text by Cicero Became the Standard For Typesetters Everywhere

in Books, Design | March 18th, 2015

In high school, the lan­guage I most fell in love with hap­pened to be a dead one: Latin. Sure, it’s spo­ken at the Vat­i­can, and when I first began to study the tongue of Vir­gil and Cat­ul­lus, friends joked that I could only use it if I moved to Rome. Tempt­ing, but church Latin bare­ly resem­bles the clas­si­cal writ­ten lan­guage, a high­ly for­mal gram­mar full of sym­me­tries and puz­zles. You don’t speak clas­si­cal Latin; you solve it, labor over it, and gloat, to no one in par­tic­u­lar, when you’ve ren­dered it some­what intel­li­gi­ble. Giv­en that the study of an ancient lan­guage is rarely a con­ver­sa­tion­al art, it can some­times feel a lit­tle alien­at­ing.

And so you might imag­ine how pleased I was to dis­cov­er what looked like clas­si­cal Latin in the real world: the text known to design­ers around the globe as “Lorem Ipsum,” also called “filler text” and (erro­neous­ly) “Greek copy.”

The idea, Priceo­nom­ics informs us, is to force peo­ple to look at the lay­out and font, not read the words. Also, “nobody would mis­take it for their native lan­guage,” there­fore Lorem Ipsum is “less like­ly than oth­er filler text to be mis­tak­en for final copy and pub­lished by acci­dent.” If you’ve done any web design, you’ve prob­a­bly seen it, look­ing some­thing like this:

Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, con­secte­tur adip­isc­ing elit, sed do eius­mod tem­por inci­didunt ut labore et dolore magna ali­qua. Ut enim ad min­im veni­am, quis nos­trud exerci­ta­tion ullam­co laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea com­mo­do con­se­quat. Duis aute irure dolor in rep­re­hen­der­it in volup­tate velit esse cil­lum dolore eu fugiat nul­la pariatur. Excep­teur sint occae­cat cup­i­datat non proident, sunt in cul­pa qui offi­cia deserunt mol­lit anim id est labo­rum.

When I first encoun­tered this text, I did what any Latin geek will—set about try­ing to trans­late it. But it wasn’t long before I real­ized that Lorem Ipsum is most­ly gib­ber­ish, a gar­bling of Latin that makes no real sense. The first word, “Lorem,” isn’t even a word; instead it’s a piece of the word “dolorem,” mean­ing pain, suf­fer­ing, or sor­row. So where did this mash-up of Latin-like syn­tax come from, and how did it get so scram­bled? First, the source of Lorem Ipsum—tracked down by Ham­p­den-Syd­ney Direc­tor of Pub­li­ca­tions Richard McClintock—is Roman lawyer, states­man, and philoso­pher Cicero, from an essay called “On the Extremes of Good and Evil,” or De Finibus Bono­rum et Mal­o­rum.

675px-Cicero_-_Musei_Capitolini

Why Cicero? Put most sim­ply, writes Priceo­nom­ics, “for a long time, Cicero was every­where.” His fame as the most skilled of Roman rhetori­cians meant that his writ­ing became the bench­mark for prose in Latin, the stan­dard Euro­pean lan­guage of the mid­dle ages. The pas­sage that gen­er­at­ed Lorem Ipsum trans­lates in part to a sen­ti­ment Latin­ists will well under­stand:

Nor is there any­one who loves or pur­sues or desires to obtain pain of itself, because it is pain, but occa­sion­al­ly cir­cum­stances occur in which toil and pain can pro­cure him some great plea­sure.

Dolorem Ipsum, “pain in and of itself,” sums up the tor­tu­ous feel­ing of try­ing to ren­der some of Cicero’s com­plex, ver­bose sen­tences into Eng­lish. Doing so with tol­er­a­ble pro­fi­cien­cy is, for some of us, “great plea­sure” indeed.

But how did Cicero, that mas­ter styl­ist, come to be so bad­ly man­han­dled as to be near­ly unrec­og­niz­able? Lorem Ipsum has a his­to­ry that long pre­dates online con­tent man­age­ment. It has been used as filler text since the six­teenth cen­tu­ry when—as McClin­tock theorized—“some type­set­ter had to make a type spec­i­men book, to demo dif­fer­ent fonts” and decid­ed that “the text should be insen­si­ble, so as not to dis­tract from the page’s graph­i­cal fea­tures.” It appears that this enter­pris­ing crafts­man snatched up a page of Cicero he had lying around and turned it into non­sense. The text, says McClin­tock, “has sur­vived not only four cen­turies of let­ter-by-let­ter reset­ting but even the leap into elec­tron­ic type­set­ting, essen­tial­ly unchanged.”

The sto­ry of Lorem Ipsum is a fas­ci­nat­ing one—if you’re into that kind of thing—but its longevi­ty rais­es a fur­ther ques­tion: should we still be using it at all, this man­gling of a dead lan­guage, in a medi­um as vital and dynam­ic as web pub­lish­ing, where “con­tent” refers to hun­dreds of design ele­ments besides font. Is Lorem Ipsum a quaint piece of nos­tal­gia that’s out­lived its use­ful­ness? In answer, you may wish to read Karen McGrane’s spir­it­ed defense of the prac­tice. Or, if you feel it’s time to let the gar­bled Latin go the way of man­u­al type­set­ting machines, con­sid­er per­haps as an alter­na­tive “Niet­zsche Ipsum,” which gen­er­ates ran­dom para­graphs of most­ly verb-less, inco­her­ent Niet­zsche-like text, in Eng­lish. Hey, at least it looks like a real lan­guage.

via Priceo­nom­ics

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Learn Latin, Old Eng­lish, San­skrit, Clas­si­cal Greek & Oth­er Ancient Lan­guages in 10 Lessons

The First Children’s Pic­ture Book, 1658’s Orbis Sen­su­al­i­um Pic­tus

On the Impor­tance of the Cre­ative Brief: Frank Gehry, Maira Kalman & Oth­ers Explain its Essen­tial Role

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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74 Essential Books for Your Personal Library: A List Curated by Female Creatives

in Books, Gender | March 13th, 2015

virginia woolf list

Pub­lic domain image orig­i­nal­ly tak­en by George Charles Beres­ford.

When Open Cul­ture recent­ly pub­lished Jorge Luis Borges’ self-com­piled list of 74 ‘great works of lit­er­a­ture’, com­mis­sioned by Argen­tine pub­lish­er Hys­pamer­i­ca, I, along with many oth­ers, saw one glar­ing issue in the oth­er­wise fan­tas­ti­cal­ly diverse list: it includ­ed no works by female writ­ers.

Whether inten­tion­al or not, the fact that women are exclud­ed from Borges’ note­wor­thies (and in 1985, no less) means that a vast num­ber of his­tor­i­cal­ly and cul­tur­al­ly sig­nif­i­cant books and writ­ings have been over­looked. While this ought not to dis­cred­it the works list­ed in any way, after wit­ness­ing the immense pop­u­lar­i­ty of Borges’ list I cer­tain­ly felt that for his selec­tion to be rel­e­vant today it need­ed to be accom­pa­nied by a list of works which had been over­looked due to the gen­der of their respec­tive authors.

I decid­ed to put a sug­ges­tion to a group of inter­na­tion­al women writ­ers, artists and cura­tors, and we com­piled our own list of 74 ‘great works of lit­er­a­ture’ — one just as var­ied, loose and sub­stan­tial as that of Borges, but made up sole­ly of writ­ers iden­ti­fy­ing as women or non-gen­der-bina­ry. Over two days we amassed many sug­ges­tions, which I’ve now curat­ed to form the list below. It’s not intend­ed to inval­i­date the orig­i­nal, but rather to serve as an accom­pa­ni­ment to high­light and encour­age a dia­logue on gen­der imbal­ances in cre­ative and intel­lec­tu­al realms, as well as to pro­vide a bal­ance by active­ly ‘equal­is­ing’ that of Jorge Luis Borges.

  1. Agatha Christie — The Mouse­trap
  2. Alber­tine Sar­razin — L’As­tra­gale
  3. Alice Walk­er — The Col­or Pur­ple
  4. Anaïs Nin — Lit­tle Birds
  5. Angela Carter — Nights at the Cir­cus
  6. Angela Davis — Are Pris­ons Obse­lete?
  7. Ani­ta Desai — Clear Light of Day
  8. Anne Car­son — Auto­bi­og­ra­phy of Red
  9. Anne Frank — The Diary of a Young Girl
  10. Anne Sex­ton — Live or Die
  11. Arund­hati Roy — The God of Small Things
  12. Banana Yoshi­mo­to — Kitchen
  13. bell hooks — Ain’t I a Woman?
  14. Beryl Bain­bridge — Mas­ter Georgie
  15. Beryl Markham — West with the Night
  16. Buchi Emecheta — The Joys of Moth­er­hood
  17. Car­son McCullers — The Heart is a Lone­ly Hunter
  18. Char­lotte Bronte — Jane Eyre
  19. Char­lotte Roche — Feucht­ge­bi­ete
  20. Chris Kraus — I Love Dick
  21. Colette — Chéri
  22. Daphne du Mau­ri­er — Rebec­ca
  23. Doris Less­ing — The Gold­en Note­book
  24. Edith Whar­ton — Age of Inno­cence
  25. Eileen Myles — Infer­no
  26. Elfriede Jelinek — Women as Lovers
  27. Emi­ly Bronte — Wuther­ing Heights
  28. Flan­nery O’Con­nor — Com­plete Sto­ries
  29. Françoise Sagan — Bon­jour Tristesse
  30. George Eliot — Silas Marn­er
  31. Gertrude Stein — The Mak­ing of Amer­i­cans
  32. Gwen­dolyn Brooks — To Dis­em­bark
  33. Han­nah Arendt — The Human Con­di­tion
  34. Harp­er Lee — To Kill a Mock­ing­bird
  35. Hillary Man­tel — Wolf Hall
  36. Iris Mur­doch — The Sea, The Sea
  37. James Tip­tree Jr. — Her Smoke Rose Up For­ev­er
  38. Jean Rhys — Wide Sar­gas­so Sea
  39. Jhumpa Lahiri — Inter­preter of Mal­adies
  40. Joan Did­ion — Slouch­ing Towards Beth­le­hem
  41. Joyce Car­ol Oats — A Blood­smoore Romance
  42. Jung Chang — Wild Swans
  43. Kate Zam­breno — Hero­ines
  44. Kathy Ack­er — Blood and Guts in High School
  45. Leono­ra Car­ring­ton — The Hear­ing Trum­pet
  46. Leslie Fein­berg — Stone Butch Blues
  47. Lor­rie Moore — Who Will Run the Frog Hos­pi­tal?
  48. Louise Erdrich — The Beet Queen
  49. Mar­garet Atwood — The Hand­maid­’s Tale
  50. Mar­guerite Duras — Le ravisse­ment de Lol V. Stein
  51. Mary Shel­ley — Franken­stein
  52. Mary Woll­stonecraft — A Vin­di­ca­tion of the Rights of Women
  53. Maya Angelou — I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
  54. Michelle Cliff — Abeng
  55. Miran­da July — No One Belongs Here More Than You
  56. Monique Wit­tig — Les Guéril­lères
  57. Murasa­ki Shik­ibu — Gen­ji Mono­gatari
  58. Muriel Spark — The Dri­ver’s Seat
  59. Octavia But­ler — Kin­dred
  60. Rachel Car­son — Silent Spring
  61. Rox­ane Gay — An Untamed State
  62. Sap­pho — Frag­ments
  63. Sara Strids­berg — Dar­ling Riv­er
  64. Sei Shō­nagon — The Pil­low Book
  65. Simone Weil — Grav­i­ty and Grace
  66. Sylvia Plath — The Bell Jar
  67. There­sa Hak Kyung Cha — Dic­tée
  68. Toni Mor­ri­son — Beloved
  69. Tove Jans­son — Mumintroll series
  70. Tsit­si Dan­garem­b­ga — Ner­vous Con­di­tions
  71. Ursu­la K Le Guin — The Left Hand of Dark­ness
  72. Vir­ginia Woolf — The Waves
  73. Willa Cather — The Song of the Lark
  74. Zadie Smith — On Beau­ty

Lulu Nunn is a Lon­don-based artist, writer, cura­tor and edi­tor of HOAX, an inter­na­tion­al jour­nal pub­lish­ing cre­ative work incor­po­rat­ing text. You can fol­low her at @lulu_nunn and HOAX at @hoaxpublication.

 

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Jorge Luis Borges Selects 74 Books for Your Personal Library

in Books, Literature | March 10th, 2015

borges personal library

“Jorge Luis Borges 1951, by Grete Stern” by Grete Stern (1904–1999). Licensed under Pub­lic Domain via Wiki­me­dia Com­mons.

Jorge Luis Borges’ terse, mind-expand­ing sto­ries reshaped mod­ern fic­tion. He was one of the first authors to mix high cul­ture with low, merg­ing such pop­u­lar gen­res as sci­ence fic­tion and the detec­tive sto­ry with heady philo­soph­i­cal dis­cours­es on author­ship, real­i­ty and exis­tence. His sto­ry “The Gar­den of the Fork­ing Paths,” which describes a nov­el that is also a labyrinth, pre­saged the hyper­tex­tu­al­i­ty of the inter­net age. His tone of iron­ic detach­ment influ­enced gen­er­a­tions of Latin Amer­i­can authors. The BBC argued that Borges was the most impor­tant writer of the 20th cen­tu­ry.

Of course, Borges wasn’t just an author. When not writ­ing fic­tion, Borges worked as a lit­er­ary crit­ic, occa­sion­al film crit­ic, a librar­i­an, and, for a spell, as the direc­tor of the Bib­liote­ca Nacional in Buenos Aires. His tastes were famous­ly eclec­tic. He did not think of much of canon­i­cal writ­ers like Goethe, Jane Austen, James Joyce and Gabriel Gar­cia Mar­quez. He favored the 19th sto­ry­tellers like Edgar Allan Poe and Rud­yard Kipling.

In 1985, Argen­tine pub­lish­er Hys­pamer­i­ca asked Borges to cre­ate A Per­son­al Library — which involved curat­ing 100 great works of lit­er­a­ture and writ­ing intro­duc­tions for each vol­ume. Though he only got through 74 books before he died of liv­er can­cer in 1988, Borges’s selec­tions are fas­ci­nat­ing and deeply idio­syn­crat­ic. He list­ed adven­ture tales by Robert Louis Steven­son and H.G. Wells along­side exot­ic holy books, 8th cen­tu­ry Japan­ese poet­ry and the mus­ing of Kierkegaard. You can see the full list below. A num­ber of the select­ed works can be found in our Free eBooks and Free Audio Books col­lec­tions.

1. Sto­ries by Julio Cortázar (not sure if this refers to Hop­scotch, Blow-Up and Oth­er Sto­ries, or nei­ther)
2. & 3. The Apoc­ryphal Gospels
4. Ameri­ka and The Com­plete Sto­ries by Franz Kaf­ka
5. The Blue Cross: A Father Brown Mys­tery by G.K. Chester­ton
6. & 7. The Moon­stone by Wilkie Collins
8. The Intel­li­gence of Flow­ers by Mau­rice Maeter­linck
9. The Desert of the Tar­tars by Dino Buz­za­ti
10. Peer Gynt and Hed­da Gabler by Hen­rik Ibsen
11. The Man­darin: And Oth­er Sto­ries by Eça de Queirós
12. The Jesuit Empire by Leopol­do Lugones
13. The Coun­ter­feit­ers by André Gide
14. The Time Machine and The Invis­i­ble Man by H.G. Wells
15. The Greek Myths by Robert Graves
16. & 17. Demons by Fyo­dor Dos­toyevsky
18. Math­e­mat­ics and the Imag­i­na­tion by Edward Kas­ner
19. The Great God Brown and Oth­er Plays, Strange Inter­lude, and Mourn­ing Becomes Elec­tra by Eugene O’Neill
20. Tales of Ise by Ari­wara no Nar­i­hara
21. Ben­i­to Cereno, Bil­ly Budd, and Bartle­by, the Scriven­er by Her­man Melville
22. The Trag­ic Every­day, The Blind Pilot, and Words and Blood by Gio­van­ni Pap­i­ni
23. The Three Impos­tors
24. Songs of Songs tr. by Fray Luis de León
25. An Expla­na­tion of the Book of Job tr. by Fray Luis de León
26. The End of the Teth­er and Heart of Dark­ness by Joseph Con­rad
27. The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gib­bon
28. Essays & Dia­logues by Oscar Wilde
29. Bar­bar­ian in Asia by Hen­ri Michaux
30. The Glass Bead Game by Her­mann Hesse
31. Buried Alive by Arnold Ben­nett
32. On the Nature of Ani­mals by Claudius Elianus
33. The The­o­ry of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen
34. The Temp­ta­tion of St. Antony by Gus­tave Flaubert
35. Trav­els by Mar­co Polo
36. Imag­i­nary lives by Mar­cel Schwob
37. Cae­sar and Cleopa­tra, Major Bar­bara, and Can­dide by George Bernard Shaw
38. Macus Bru­tus and The Hour of All by Fran­cis­co de Queve­do
39. The Red Red­maynes by Eden Phillpotts
40. Fear and Trem­bling by Søren Kierkegaard
41. The Golem by Gus­tav Meyrink
42. The Les­son of the Mas­ter, The Fig­ure in the Car­pet, and The Pri­vate Life by Hen­ry James
43. & 44. The Nine Books of the His­to­ry of Herodotus by Her­do­tus
45. Pedro Páramo by Juan Rul­fo
46. Tales by Rud­yard Kipling
47. Vathek by William Beck­ford
48. Moll Flan­ders by Daniel Defoe
49. The Pro­fes­sion­al Secret & Oth­er Texts by Jean Cocteau
50. The Last Days of Emmanuel Kant and Oth­er Sto­ries by Thomas de Quincey
51. Pro­logue to the Work of Sil­ve­rio Lan­za by Ramon Gomez de la Ser­na
52. The Thou­sand and One Nights
53. New Ara­bi­an Nights and Markheim by Robert Louis Steven­son
54. Sal­va­tion of the Jews, The Blood of the Poor, and In the Dark­ness by Léon Bloy
55. The Bha­gavad Gita and The Epic of Gil­gamesh
56. Fan­tas­tic Sto­ries by Juan José Arreo­la
57. Lady into Fox, A Man in the Zoo, and The Sailor’s Return by David Gar­nett
58. Gul­liv­er’s Trav­els by Jonathan Swift
59. Lit­er­ary Crit­i­cism by Paul Grous­sac
60. The Idols by Manuel Muji­ca Láinez
61. The Book of Good Love by Juan Ruiz
62. Com­plete Poet­ry by William Blake
63. Above the Dark Cir­cus by Hugh Wal­pole
64. Poet­i­cal Works by Eze­quiel Mar­tinez Estra­da
65. Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
66. The Aeneid by Vir­gil
67. Sto­ries by Voltaire
68. An Exper­i­ment with Time by J.W. Dunne
69. An Essay on Orlan­do Furioso by Atilio Momigliano
70. & 71. The Vari­eties of Reli­gious Expe­ri­ence and The Study of Human Nature by William James
72. Egil’s Saga by Snor­ri Sturlu­son
73. The Book of the Dead
74. & 75. The Prob­lem of Time by J. Alexan­der Gunn

As you will observe, Borges’ list is very short on books by women writ­ers. As a counter-offer­ing, you might want to explore this list: 74 Essen­tial Books for Your Per­son­al Library: A List Curat­ed by Female Cre­atives.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

“Borges: Pro­file of a Writer” Presents the Life and Writ­ings of Argentina’s Favorite Son, Jorge Luis Borges

Jorge Luis Borges’ 1967–8 Nor­ton Lec­tures On Poet­ry (And Every­thing Else Lit­er­ary)

Jorge Luis Borges’ Favorite Short Sto­ries (Read 7 Free Online)

Jonathan Crow is a Los Ange­les-based writer and film­mak­er whose work has appeared in Yahoo!, The Hol­ly­wood Reporter, and oth­er pub­li­ca­tions. You can fol­low him at @jonccrow. And check out his blog Veep­to­pus, fea­tur­ing lots of pic­tures of bad­gers and even more pic­tures of vice pres­i­dents with octo­pus­es on their heads.  The Veep­to­pus store is here.

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Weapons of Mass Instruction: Watch a 1979 Ford Falcon Get Converted in a Tank Armored with 900 Free Books

in Books | March 10th, 2015

He has a wild look in his eyes, but a beau­ti­ful idea in his mind. Meet Raul Leme­soff, an eccen­tric char­ac­ter from Buenos Aires, who takes old cars and turns them into “mil­i­taris­tic bib­lio­the­cas” that dri­ve the streets of Argenti­na, giv­ing free books to those who want them. This is an ongo­ing project for Leme­soff, but the weaponized 1979 Ford Fal­con you see above was spe­cial­ly cre­at­ed to cel­e­brate World Book Day on March 5th. You can thank 7UP for com­mis­sion­ing that project.

via Men­tal Floss/This is Colos­sal

Fol­low us on Face­book, Twit­ter and Google Plus and share intel­li­gent media with your friends. And if you see any great items we should fea­ture on our site, send them our way. We’d love to get your ideas.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

700 Free eBooks

630 Free Audio Books

135 Free Phi­los­o­phy eBooks

Watch “Por­trait of a Book­store as an Old Man”

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Artist Takes Old Books and Gives Them New Life as Intricate Sculptures

in Art, Books, TED Talks | March 5th, 2015

New York-based artist Bri­an Dettmer cuts into old books with X‑ACTO knives and turns them into remixed works of art. Speak­ing at TED Youth last Novem­ber, he told the audi­ence, “I think of my work as sort of a remix .… because I’m work­ing with some­body else’s mate­r­i­al in the same way that a D.J. might be work­ing with some­body else’s music.” “I carve into the sur­face of the book, and I’m not mov­ing or adding any­thing. I’m just carv­ing around what­ev­er I find inter­est­ing. So every­thing you see with­in the fin­ished piece is exact­ly where it was in the book before I began.”

brian-dettmer-book-art

Dettmer puts on dis­play his pret­ty fan­tas­tic cre­ations, all while explain­ing how he sees the book — as a body, a tech­nol­o­gy, a tool, a machine, a land­scape, a case study in archae­ol­o­gy. The talk runs six min­utes and deliv­ers more than the aver­age TED Talk does in 17.

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What Books Could Be Used to Rebuild Civilization?: Lists by Brian Eno, Stewart Brand, Kevin Kelly & Other Forward-Thinking Minds

in Books, Life | February 18th, 2015

One par­tic­u­lar­ly dis­tress­ing hall­mark of late moder­ni­ty can be char­ac­ter­ized as a cul­tur­al loss of the future. Where we once delight­ed in imag­in­ing the turns civ­i­liza­tion would take hun­dreds and even thou­sands of years ahead—projecting rad­i­cal designs, inno­v­a­tive solu­tions, great explo­rations, and pecu­liar evo­lu­tion­ary developments—we now find the mode of fore­cast­ing has grown apoc­a­lyp­tic, as cli­mate change and oth­er cat­a­stroph­ic, man-made glob­al phe­nom­e­na make it dif­fi­cult to avoid some very dire con­clu­sions about humanity’s impend­ing fate. We can add to this assess­ment the loss of what we may call the “long view” in our day-to-day lives.

As the Long Now Foun­da­tion co-founder Stew­art Brand describes it, “civ­i­liza­tion is revving itself into a patho­log­i­cal­ly short atten­tion span,” dri­ven by “the accel­er­a­tion of tech­nol­o­gy, the short-hori­zon per­spec­tive of mar­ket-dri­ven eco­nom­ics, the next-elec­tion per­spec­tive of democ­ra­cies, or the dis­trac­tions of per­son­al mul­ti-task­ing.”

Such is the tex­ture of mod­ern exis­tence, and though we may run our hands over it dai­ly, remark­ing on how tight­ly woven the fab­ric is, we seem to have few-to-no mech­a­nisms for unweaving—or even loosening—the threads. Enter the Long Now Foun­da­tion and its pro­pos­al of “both a mech­a­nism and a myth” as a means encour­ag­ing “the long view and the tak­ing of long-term respon­si­bil­i­ty.”

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Image cour­tesy of Because We Can

Inspired by com­put­er sci­en­tist Daniel Hill’s idea for a Stone­henge-sized clock that “ticks once a year, bongs once a cen­tu­ry, and the cuck­oo comes out every mil­len­ni­um,” the foun­da­tion pro­pos­es a num­ber of projects and guide­lines for restor­ing long-term think­ing, includ­ing “mind­ing myth­ic depth,” “reward­ing patience,” and “ally­ing with com­pe­ti­tion.” The clock, ini­tial­ly a thought exper­i­ment, is becom­ing a real­i­ty, as you can see in the short video above, with a mas­sive, “mon­u­ment scale” ver­sion under con­struc­tion in West Texas and scale pro­to­types in Lon­don and the Long Now Foundation’s San Fran­cis­co head­quar­ters. Large­ly a sym­bol­ic ges­ture, the “10,000 year clock,” as it’s called, has been joined with anoth­er, emi­nent­ly prac­ti­cal under­tak­ing rem­i­nis­cent of Isaac Asimov’s Ency­clo­pe­dia Galac­ti­ca—a “library of the deep future.”

One wing of this library, the Man­u­al for Civ­i­liza­tion, aims to com­pile a col­lec­tion of 3,500 books in the Foun­da­tion’s phys­i­cal space—books deemed most like­ly to “sus­tain or rebuild civ­i­liza­tion.” To begin the project, var­i­ous future-mind­ed con­trib­u­tors have been asked to make their own lists of books to add. The first list comes from musician/composer/producer/musical futur­ist and found­ing board mem­ber Bri­an Eno, who named the foun­da­tion. Oth­er notable con­trib­u­tors include Long Now Foun­da­tion pres­i­dent Stew­art Brand and board mem­ber and co-founder of Wired mag­a­zine Kevin Kel­ly. Below, see the first ten titles from each of these futurist’s lists, and fur­ther down, links to the full list of con­trib­u­tors’ selec­tions so far. As you scan the titles below, and browse through each contributor’s list, con­sid­er why and how each of these books would help human­i­ty rebuild civ­i­liza­tion, and sug­gest books of your own in the com­ments.

10 Titles from Bri­an Eno’s Man­u­al for Civ­i­liza­tion list

10 Titles from Stew­art Brand’s Man­u­al for Civ­i­liza­tion list

10 Titles from Kevin Kelly’s Man­u­al for Civ­i­liza­tion list

Once again, these are only excerpts from longer lists by these three futur­is­tic thinkers. For their com­plete selec­tions, click on their lists below, as well as those from such cul­tur­al fig­ures as sci-fi writer Neal Stephen­son and Brain Pick­ings’ edi­tor Maria Popo­va. And please let us know: Which books would you include in the “Man­u­al for Civ­i­liza­tion” library project, and why? You can also add your own sug­ges­tions for the grow­ing library at the Long Now Foun­da­tion’s web­site.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

What Books Should Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Read?: Tell Us Your Picks; We’ll Tell You Ours

Neil deGrasse Tyson Lists 8 (Free) Books Every Intel­li­gent Per­son Should Read

The 10 Great­est Books Ever, Accord­ing to 125 Top Authors (Down­load Them for Free)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

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600+ Covers of Philip K. Dick Novels from Around the World: Greece, Japan, Poland & Beyond

in Art, Books | February 17th, 2015

Radio Free Albemuth-gr

I envy book design­ers tasked with putting togeth­er cov­ers for Philip K. Dick nov­els, and yet I don’t envy them. On one hand, they get the chance to visu­al­ly inter­pret some of the most unusu­al, inde­scrib­able genre fic­tion ever writ­ten; on the oth­er hand, they bear the bur­den of visu­al­ly rep­re­sent­ing some of the most unusu­al, inde­scrib­able genre fic­tion ever writ­ten.

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Dick wrote inter­est­ing books, to put it mild­ly, and as book-lovers know, cer­tain coun­tries’ pub­lish­ing indus­tries tend to put out more inter­est­ing book cov­ers than oth­ers. So what hap­pens at the inter­sec­tion? Here we present to you a selec­tion of Philip K. Dick cov­ers from around the world, begin­ning with a Greek cov­er of his posthu­mous­ly pub­lished nov­el Radio Free Albe­muth that fea­tures the man him­self, relax­ing in his nat­ur­al inter­plan­e­tary envi­ron­ment beside his vin­tage radio.

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That book put a bare­ly fic­tion­al gloss on Dick­’s own psy­cho­log­i­cal expe­ri­ences, as did Valis, whose Ital­ian edi­tion you also see pic­tured here. But his more fan­tas­ti­cal nov­els, such as the I Ching-dri­ven sto­ry of an Amer­i­ca that lost the Sec­ond World War, have received equal­ly com­pelling inter­na­tion­al cov­ers, such as the one from Chile just above.

flow-jp

You can usu­al­ly trust Japan­ese pub­lish­ers to come up with book designs nei­ther too abstract nor too lit­er­al for the con­tents with­in, as one of their edi­tions of Flow My Tears, the Police­man Said quite lit­er­al­ly illus­trates just above. And if you can rely on Japan for that sort of cov­er, you can rely on France for under­state­ment; half the French nov­els I’ve seen have noth­ing on the front but the name of the work, the author, and the pub­lish­er, but behold how Dick­’s untamed exper­i­men­tal spir­it allowed Robert Laf­font to cut loose:

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But if you real­ly want to see an unusu­al graph­ic design cul­ture, you’ve got to look to Poland. We fea­tured that coun­try’s dis­tinc­tive movie posters a few years ago, but their books also par­take of the very same delight­ful­ly askew visu­al tra­di­tion, one I imag­ine that would have done Dick him­self proud­est. Below we have Pol­ish cov­er art for Con­fes­sions of a Crap Artist, his nov­el of mid­cen­tu­ry sub­ur­ban strife, com­posed with mate­ri­als few of us would have thought to use:

confessions-of-a-crap-artist-polish

You can see 600+ inter­na­tion­al Philip K. Dick cov­ers at philipkdick.com’s cov­er gallery, which has for some rea­son gone offline, but which most­ly sur­vives through the mag­ic of the Inter­net Way­back Machine — a device Dick nev­er imag­ined even in his far­thest-out, trick­i­est-to-rep­re­sent fan­tasies.

Relat­ed Content:

Philip K. Dick Takes You Inside His Life-Chang­ing Mys­ti­cal Expe­ri­ence

Robert Crumb Illus­trates Philip K. Dick’s Infa­mous, Hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry Meet­ing with God (1974)

Down­load 14 Great Sci-Fi Sto­ries by Philip K. Dick as Free Audio Books and Free eBooks

Philip K. Dick Pre­views Blade Run­ner: “The Impact of the Film is Going to be Over­whelm­ing” (1981)

50 Film Posters From Poland: From The Empire Strikes Back to Raiders of the Lost Ark

Col­in Mar­shall hosts and pro­duces Note­book on Cities and Cul­ture as well as the video series The City in Cin­e­ma and writes essays on cities, lan­guage, Asia, and men’s style. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.

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