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According to this interview, Tom Tykwer, director of Run Lola Run and the recent The International, is working on a film version of Dave Eggers’ What Is the What, his semi-biographical novel about Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng. (via crazymonk)
The Very Hungry Caterpillar was one of my favorite books when I was a kid and I’ve loved reading it to Ollie over the past few months. So of course, Google’s logo today is aces.
Now do Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs!
The Millions has created a map for a walking tour of NYC’s independent book stores. The good news is the walk won’t take you too long. (This is also the bad news.)
Although I’m increasingly appreciative of books that don’t contain extensive acknowledgement sections, that section is often the first thing I read in books that have them. I find that who someone thanks provides a meaningful context for the rest of the book.
From the Guilty Secrets survey by Spread the Word, the top ten books that people say that they’ve read but haven’t.
1. 1984 by George Orwell (42%)
2. War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (31%)
3. Ulysses by James Joyce (25%)
4. The Bible (24%)
5. Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert (16%)
6. A Brief History of Time by Stephen Hawking (15%)
7. Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie (14%)
8. In Remembrance of Things Past by Marcel Proust (9%)
9. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama (6%)
10. The Selfish Gene by Richard Dawkins (6%)
I’ve read 1, 6, bits of 4, and started on 10 but didn’t get more than 20 pages in. (Sorry, Dawkins!) This is a UK-centric list…I wonder what the US list would look like.
Two more new novels by Roberto Bolaño were recently found among his papers.
It follows the discovery of another novel, entitled The Third Reich, which was shown to publishers at the Frankfurt book fair in October. Publication of the books would add to the number of works by Bolaño due to appear over the next few years; the English translations of three novels and four collections of stories are already scheduled for the end of 2011.
I’m currently working my way through 2666 and enjoying it so far. (thx, david)
Now you can go to the iTunes Store to buy the Kindle app from Amazon that lets you read ebooks made for the Kindle device on the iPhone. Yes, it’s that confusing! Maybe they shouldn’t have called the app the same name as the device…I thought “Kindle” was the device? A noun and a verb form of the same proper name is ok (e.g. “I googled you on Google” or “Please digg my link on Digg”) but two nouns seems like a no-no.
A full version of Sir Thomas Browne’s Pseudodoxia Epidemica is available online. First published in 1646, the book refutes errors and superstitions common to the 17th century. For instance:
That Crystall is nothing else but Ice strongly congealed.
That a Diamond is made soft, or broke by the blood of a Goate.
That a Bever to escape the Hunter bites off his testicles or stones.
Concerning the beginning of the world, that the time thereof is not precisely knowne, as commonly it is presumed.
(thx, julian)
Many of the readers of David Foster Wallace have been waiting for The New Yorker to cover the writer’s life since his death last September, something more than the quick Talk of the Town piece by the fiction editor published shortly after his death, some of that “sprawling New Yorker shit” that possessed a certain kinship with Wallace’s work. The March 9 issue follows through with two articles, one by Wallace and one on Wallace. The piece by Wallace is a chunk of the novel he left unfinished when he died. (More on that below.) The novel, entitled The Pale King, is about the transcendence that comes through boredom. I don’t think Lane Dean is quite there yet:
Then he looked up, despite all best prior intentions. In four minutes, it would be another hour; a half hour after that was the ten-minute break. Lane Dean imagined himself running around on the break, waving his arms and shouting gibberish and holding ten cigarettes at once in his mouth, like a panpipe. Year after year, a face the same color as your desk. Lord Jesus. Coffee wasn’t allowed because of spills on the files, but on the break he’d have a big cup of coffee in each hand while he pictured himself running around the outside grounds, shouting. He knew what he’d really do on the break was sit facing the wall clock in the lounge and, despite prayers and effort, count the seconds tick off until he had to come back and do this again. And again and again and again.
The Lane Dean character was featured once before in the New Yorker’s pages, a second chunk of the novel published in 2007 as Good People.
The second piece, a profile of Wallace by D.T. Max that focuses on his writing, especially his struggles in pulling the fragments of The Pale King into something finished, is long and difficult to read at times. It’s intimate; Max relies on interviews with Wallace’s wife, family & editors, private correspondence between Wallace and his friends, and passages from this unfinished novel that, for a long time, Wallace didn’t want anyone to read. It seems that anyone with $20 or a library card will get to read at least some of it after all.
From 1997 on, Wallace worked on a third novel, which he never finished — the “Long Thing,” as he referred to it with Michael Pietsch. His drafts, which his wife found in their garage after his death, amount to several hundred thousand words, and tell of a group of employees at an Internal Revenue Service center in Illinois, and how they deal with the tediousness of their work. The partial manuscript — which Little, Brown plans to publish next year — expands on the virtues of mindfulness and sustained concentration. Properly handled, boredom can be an antidote to our national dependence on entertainment, the book suggests.
The magazine also has an online feature that includes two scanned pages from The Pale King manuscript and some artwork from Karen Green, Wallace’s wife, which is obviously biographical in nature. Hard to Fill, indeed.
Similar to the list of books That Changed The World is this list of mono-histories, biographies of singular items.
Salt: a world history, by Mark Kurlansky - Published in 2002, Kurlansky’s history of the world’s most important commodity is probably the best known mono-history and the only one to appear on the best-seller lists. I found it fascinating and inspiring. Kurlansky must have enjoyed his foray into mono-history because he’s followed up on Salt with Cod: A Biography of the Fish That Changed the World and The Big Oyster: History on the Half Shell.
Other topics covered by these books are pizza, pencils, and the alphabet. (via rebecca’s pocket (welcome back!))
Update: Several people have noted that Cod was published five years before Salt. (thx, all)
An interview with Alissa Hamilton about her new book, Squeezed, reveals that that fresh orange juice you’re buying might not be so fresh or even orange-y.
In the process of pasteurizing, juice is heated and stripped of oxygen, a process called deaeration, so it doesn’t oxidize. Then it’s put in huge storage tanks where it can be kept for upwards of a year. It gets stripped of flavor-providing chemicals, which are volatile. When it’s ready for packaging, companies such as Tropicana hire flavor companies such as Firmenich to engineer flavor packs to make it taste fresh. People think not-from-concentrate is a fresher product, but it also sits in storage for quite a long time.
(thx, oli)
Historians are still piecing together what happened to Alexander Selkirk, upon whom Robinson Crusoe was based.
He had spent four years and four months on Más a Tierra, a windswept island in the Juan Fernandez archipelago, 650 kilometers (404 miles) off the coast of Chile. He was as alone as a human being can be. For Selkirk, there was no “Man Friday,” a character Defoe created for his novel.
Selkirk was rescued by pirates and become one himself, making a fortune in the process. (via ny times ideas)
This review of Superorganism, a new book by Bert Hölldobler and Edward O. Wilson, is chock full of fascinating facts about ant societies and how they organize themselves.
The progress of ants from this relatively primitive state to the complexity of the most finely tuned superorganisms leaves no doubt that the progress of human evolution has largely followed a path taken by the ants tens of millions of years earlier. Beginning as simple hunter-gatherers, some ants have learned to herd and milk bugs, just as we milk cattle and sheep. There are ants that take slaves, ants that lay their eggs in the nests of foreign ants (much like cuckoos do among birds), leaving the upbringing of their young to others, and there are even ants that have discovered agriculture. These agricultural ants represent the highest level of ant civilization, yet it is not plants that they cultivate, but mushrooms.
After writing The Cat in the Hat in 1955 using only 223 words, Dr. Seuss bet his publisher that he could write a book using only 50 words. Seuss collected on the wager in 1960 with the publication of Green Eggs and Ham. Here are the 50 distinct words used in the book:
a am and anywhere are be boat box car could dark do eat eggs fox goat good green ham here house I if in let like may me mouse not on or rain Sam say see so thank that the them there they train tree try will with would you
From a programming perspective, one of the fun things about Green Eggs and Ham is because the text contains so little information repeated in a cumulative tale, the story could be more efficiently represented as an algorithm. A simple loop would take the place of the following excerpt:
I do not like them in a box.
I do not like them with a fox.
I do not like them in a house.
I do not like them with a mouse.
I do not like them here or there.
I do not like them anywhere.
I do not like green eggs and ham.
I do not like them, Sam I am.
But I don’t know…foreach (\$items as \$value) doesn’t quite have the same sense of poetry as the original Seuss.
On the long list of books I would read if I had the time for such a thing, reading, is Art & Fear. Ted Orland, one of the authors and a working artist himself, describes the book thusly:
This is a book about the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn’t get made, and about the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way.
Kevin Kelly called the book “astoundingly brilliant” and pulled this excellent excerpt from it.
The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot — albeit a perfect one — to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes — the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.
Special heads-up to Merlin Mann: the first book in the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought list for Twyla Tharp’s The Creative Habit that you’ve been going on and on about is, bum bum bum, Art & Fear. You should maybe 1-click that sucker right into your book-hole. (via modcult)
In 1959, John Howard Griffin altered his appearance to look like a black man and travelled through the South documenting his experiences, which he collected into a 1961 book called Black Like Me.
“[Whites] judged me by no other quality. My skin was dark. That was sufficient reason for them to deny me those rights and freedoms without which life loses its significance and becomes a matter of little more than animal survival.” He became depressed, and his face lapsed into “the strained, disconsolate expression that is written on the countenance of so many Southern Negroes.” He “decided to try to pass back into white society” and scrubbed off the stain; immediately “I was once more a first-class citizen.” The knowledge gave him little joy.
Contemporary reviewer Jonathan Yardley says that the book has “lost surprisingly little of its power” since its publication. (via 3qd)
Michael Lewis cast his Moneyball lens on basketball in this week’s NY Times Magazine. The Billy Beane of the roundball story, more or less, is Shane Battier, a guard for the Houston Rockets. Battier doesn’t seem like a great basketball player, but he does a lot of little things that helps his team win.
Battier’s game is a weird combination of obvious weaknesses and nearly invisible strengths. When he is on the court, his teammates get better, often a lot better, and his opponents get worse — often a lot worse. He may not grab huge numbers of rebounds, but he has an uncanny ability to improve his teammates’ rebounding. He doesn’t shoot much, but when he does, he takes only the most efficient shots. He also has a knack for getting the ball to teammates who are in a position to do the same, and he commits few turnovers. On defense, although he routinely guards the N.B.A.’s most prolific scorers, he significantly Âreduces their shooting percentages.
Battier sounds like an intriguing fellow but the most interesting part of the article is about how the players’ incentives differ in basketball from other major American sports.
There is a tension, peculiar to basketball, between the interests of the team and the interests of the individual. The game continually tempts the people who play it to do things that are not in the interest of the group. On the baseball field, it would be hard for a player to sacrifice his team’s interest for his own. Baseball is an individual sport masquerading as a team one: by doing what’s best for himself, the player nearly always also does what is best for his team. “There is no way to selfishly get across home plate,” as Morey puts it. “If instead of there being a lineup, I could muscle my way to the plate and hit every single time and damage the efficiency of the team — that would be the analogy. Manny Ramirez can’t take at-bats away from David Ortiz. We had a point guard in Boston who refused to pass the ball to a certain guy.”
No wonder it’s so hard to build a basketball team with the right balance of skills and personalities. Take five guys, put them on a court, let them do whatever they think they need to do to get a larger contract next year, and maybe you get some pretty good results. Now, consider a situation where the plus/minus statistic is the basis for player salaries and all of sudden, players need to figure out how they can make the other four guys on the floor better. And while everyone is making adjustments to each others’ games, each player is adjusting to everyone else’s game, and the process becomes this fragile and intricate nonlinear dance that results in either beautiful chaos or the 1972-73 Philadelphia 76ers.
PS. The brief author bio at the end of the article continues the recent game of “next book” Whack-A-Mole from Lewis. Since the publication of The Blind Side in 2006, Lewis’ next book has been listed in various outlets as being about New Orleans/Katrina, financial panics (which turned out to be an anthology edited by Lewis), his sequel to Liar’s Poker about the current financial crisis, and now is listed as “Home Game, a memoir about fatherhood”. I give up.
The Ascent of Money is a two-hour documentary about the evolution of money and finance. The whole thing is available for viewing on PBS’s web site for free.
“Everyone needs to understand the complex history of money and our relationship to it,” he says. “By learning how societies have continually created and survived financial crises, we can find solid solutions to today’s worldwide economic emergency.” As he traverses historic financial hot spots around the world, Ferguson illuminates fundamental economic concepts and speaks with leading experts in the financial world.
The series is based on Niall Ferguson’s book of the same name (an Amazon and NY Times bestseller) and will air in an expanded 4-hour version later this year. (via lined & unlined)
The School of Visual Arts has published a list of recommended reading for their MFA in Interaction Design program.
The Book Design Review has collected a number of book covers that feature books on them. An addition to the list: Penguin’s paperback cover of The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Walter Benjamin.
Amazon announces the second version of the Kindle, their e-ink reading device. The price is $359.
Order Kindle now to RESERVE YOUR PLACE IN LINE. We prioritize orders on a first come, first served basis. If you have previously placed an order for Kindle 1, and have not yet received it, your order will automatically be upgraded to Kindle 2. You need to do nothing.
Also, those who own the original version of the Kindle will be given priority for ordering. The device itself is slimmer, has text-to-speech, better e-ink display, more storage (~1500 books), and doesn’t look like a Pontiac Aztek anymore. From the NY Times coverage of the announcement:
Mr. Bezos concludes with some high-level thinking: “Our vision is every book, ever printed, in any language , all available in less than 60 seconds.
Which makes Bezos’ aim pretty clear: Amazon : Apple :: Kindle/amazon.com : iPod/iTunes Store :: Bezos : Jobs.
In lieu of a book review, a writer shares her feelings about Infinite Jest.
Reading IJ is like forging a spiritual connection with a man who expresses my feelings better than I do. As someone who writes, I’ve often felt that language is so poor an instrument for communication or expression. I find it unyieldingly difficult to write an honest sentence. DFW exhibits otherwise. George Saunders, in his remarks at David Foster Wallace’s memorial service, called Wallace “a wake-up artist.” Yes. DFW’s words, beyond creating solid smart sentences and solid smart stories, reach this part of you that you thought no one could reach, saying everything you’ve been wanting to say and hear, everything you’ve been thinking on your own but haven’t been able to share with anyone else.
(thx, julie)
Snarkmarket, one of my favorite WWW homepages, is making a book on the new liberal arts based on the conversation in the comments of a recent post.
It’s 2009. A generation of digital natives is careening towards college. The economy is rebooting itself weekly. We have new responsibilities now — as employees, citizens, and friends — and we have new capabilities, too. The new liberal arts equip us for a world like this. But… what are they?
The time is ripe to expand and invigorate our notion of the liberal arts. Is design a liberal art now? How about photography? Food? Personal branding?
My favorite description of the book is that it’s “the course catalog for some amazing new school”. The book’s focus dovetails nicely with my activities here on kottke.org; I can’t wait to contribute (hopefully!) and read it. In true Snarkmarket fashion, they’re looking for contributors to the project…details here.
BTW, my “liberal arts 2.0” description of kottke.org is generously listed as one of the seeds of the idea. I came up with the term a couple of years ago while concocting an elevator pitch for kottke.org. Liberal arts 2.0 seemed like the sort of thing that the site was about and that someone would understand a bit with little explanation…better than “kottke.org is about all kinds of stuff” anyway. I used the term in a talk I did at MoMA in 2007 with the following as “fields of study” in the new discipline:
Graphic design, freakonomics, photography, programming, film, remixing, video games, food, advertising, internet life skills, journalism, fashion.
The developing thread already contains many more interesting ideas than those, particularly Jennifer’s vote for the inclusion of home economics:
Home economics. Cooking for yourself. Growing food for yourself. Making clothing for yourself. Why are these things important enough to be included as a “liberal art”? One word: sustainability. We all need to do our part to shrink our footprint, but many of us have no idea how, and for most people born after 1960 (or so) it’s not something they learned in the home, either.
as well as Tim’s expansion of the concept:
Let’s put the “economics” back in “home economics”! Because it’s not really just about the home anymore — you have to think about the broader connections of the organization of your daily life to global operations, histories, labor, politics, geology and ecology. And that is home economics as a liberal art.
Now available at your local library or bookstore, all sorts of things that Changed the World, including:
Mikhail Gorbachev
The dot
Jesus
William Shatner
A geological map of England and Wales
Bananas
The color mauve
The Beatles 1964 and 1965 tours
Cod
A photo tour of the Boston-area locations mentioned in Infinite Jest. From the photographer:
Perhaps most interestingly, although “Enfield” is not a real town, it seems to substitute for Chestnut Hill. We found a school at the top of one of the larger hills in Chestnut Hill, which we believe is the location for ETA.
Perhaps someday there will be IJ walking tours of Boston that same way there are Ulysses -based tours of Dublin or Sex and the City tours of NYC.
The Book Cover Archive is a new site dedicated to the “appreciation and categorization of excellence in book cover design”. They just launched but the site already includes 800 covers.
A proposed bailout for the publishing industry:
The role of the ratings agencies cannot be overlooked in creating this crisis. The Pulitzer, Booker and National Book Foundation committees continued to award top ratings to these novels, even as unread copies piled up all over America.
These unreadable novels are clogging up our literary system, and undermining the strength of our otherwise sound literary institutions. As a result, Americans’ personal libraries are threatened, and the ability of readers to borrow, and of libraries to lend, has been disrupted.
(via erasing)
The Millions has a rundown of some of the most anticipated books of the coming year, stating that “2009 may be a great year for books”. News to me: along with the film that he and Spike Jonze co-wrote, Dave Eggers is doing a novel based on Where the Wild Things Are.
The Wild Things novelization, Sendak says, was all Eggers’s idea. A plan had always been in place to have some kind of book come out to “add to the noise of the movie,” he says, but at first it wasn’t clear what the book would actually be. Once tie-in talk began in earnest, Sendak, who had grown close to Eggers during work on the screenplay, began a campaign to have Eggers do it, and Eggers stepped up and agreed, broaching the idea of the novel.
Our Dumb World is an atlas of the World presented by The Onion. It manages to inform (poorly) and entertain at the same time. For instance, here’s their description of Israel:
Home to one-third of the world’s Jews and two-thirds of the world’s anti-Semites, the nation of Israel is a place so holy that merely walking in it can gain you a place in the World to Come, nowadays often within minutes.
And about the US, “The Land Of Opportunism”:
The United States was founded in 1776 on the principles of life, liberty, and the reckless pursuit of happiness at any cost — even life and liberty.
The atlas is also available in book form.
There are more slaves in the world today than at any time in human history. Buying a slave in Haiti takes just a few minutes and is only a short plane ride away.
But the deal isn’t done. Benavil leans in close. “This is a rather delicate question. Is this someone you want as just a worker? Or also someone who will be a ‘partner’? You understand what I mean?”
You don’t blink at being asked if you want the child for sex. “I mean, is it possible to have someone that could be both?”
“Oui!” Benavil responds enthusiastically.
If you’re interested in taking your purchase back to the United States, Benavil tells you that he can “arrange” the proper papers to make it look as though you’ve adopted the child.
This article is adapted from E. Benjamin Skinner’s A Crime So Monstrous: Face-to-Face with Modern-Day Slavery.
Update: I believe I’ve linked to Free the Slaves before but it’s always worth another look.
Free the Slaves liberates slaves around the world, helps them rebuild their lives and researches real world solutions to eradicate slavery forever. We use world class research and compelling stories from the frontlines of slavery to convince the powerful and the powerless that we can end slavery.
(thx, jacob)
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