Search Results for: log book

THE NEW DIET

Friday, March 17, 2006

Best job in the world: writing about Ghostface Killah for lame-o New Yorker readers. I’ve heard the album, and it is great. (A fun note: Ghostface comes right after George Saunders on my Ipod artists menu.)
If your eyeball pops out of socket…panic. (I would.)
Anders Nilsen’s illustrations for Hans Christian Anderson’s Fairy Tales.
Chapter One of Naomi Klein’s NO LOGO, which I read ages ago, but still think is brilliant. Search the whole book on Google Books.

BIG, ER, BUBBA IS WATCHING YOU

Sunday, March 12, 2006

(based on a real photo by Doug Mills that Meg clipped for me…)

Lester Bangs on Van Morrison’s Astral Weeks.
Junebug would be a great movie if you walked in late and had to leave early. Real people who talk like real people living in a real place. Now where would I be if I was a screwdriver?
Freud’s Jokes and their Relation to the Unconcious. Done up as a sweet book by Ralph Steadman.
DFW’s review of an old Updike novel contains a final sentence that I think could serve as a summary for about 50% of fictional characters nowadays (not to mention a few folks we all know): “…it never once occurs to him that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.”

DRAWING CRUMBY COMICS AND LISTENING TO KID A

Friday, March 10, 2006

$Year\'s Best Graphic Novels, Comics & Manga$

“Actually, a lot of these poses in these panels I took from freeze-framing the Fly Girls on In Living Color.” – R. Crumb
Meghan says KID A is the ultimate work-in-the-studio-with-headphones album. If, like me, you’ve been out of touch with your Radiohead fandom, check out their blog. Lots of cool pictures recording the new album. Also, check out Stanley Donwood’s slowly downward. His photoshop work and site design for Radiohead…big inspiration for me when I was 17.
Ray Kurzweil on Science Friday: the singularity is near.
Short story: Eric Puchner reading “Animals Here Below.”
Short story: Etgar Keret, “Actually, I’ve had some phenomenal hard-ons lately.”

Sean on “Tonight You Belong to Me,” from The Jerk.
Virtual drum machines. Awesome.
Great interview with Dan Savage from a while back.
Oh, Project Runway. It was probably the safe bet to give Chloe the money, but damn, I really liked Santino. (Andre and Tim at Red Lobster, Tim Gunn singing Closer, the musical numbers…)

AS LONG AS IT ISN’T BORING

Saturday, February 18, 2006

Next month is Small Press Month.

Last year was actually a pretty good year for short fiction: the Story Prize has recommendations. (See if you can match the recommendations with the advisory board.)

I like Maureen McHugh’s book a lot (and I liked her reading at Mac’s way back too) and her blog posts are very long and make me feel stalkerish.

Here’s a podcast featuring an interview with Ander Monson, in which he discusses Twin Peaks, book design, and Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, among other things. Talking about the graphic elements of Other Electricities:

I had originally composed this book in Pagemaker….It’s really sad now that you don’t see more books with these visual elements. Now we have all the graphic novels happening, and I think that’s a good influence on the publishing world. But even when I was trying to sell this book, I was trying to find an agent for it, and I got letters back that said, “Dude, there’s graphics in here, there’s no way I’m going to be able to sell it,” and I wanted to respond, “Have you seen what people are buying? I mean, they’re buying Chris Ware!”

And about the lack of graphic elements in modern fiction:

My guess is that it has a lot to do with the workshop model in MFA programs. Which, pretty much forbids that you have any kind of graphical element, you have to turn your stories in, in double-spaced, regular type….But I think it also has to do with the production model of traditional publishing, where it has not been reasonable for most writers to include graphic elements. We’ve only had Pagemaker for 5-10 years. So, I’ve got this pet theory that writers, now that the technology is more and more transparent, we’re going to have writers who are able to actually do good things with visual elements in ways that they weren’t able to before.