kottke.org posts about books
This slim booklet has been sitting on my bookshelf for ages, and I finally decided to give it a shot yesterday. Here is New York is amazing book, perhaps the most succinct and apt description of New York City ever put on paper. In the hands of E.B. White, NYC is at once a city of inches and multitudes, of loneliness and excitement, of riches and squalor, of permanence and transience. The particulars of the city have changed, as White himself admits, but the first half of the book could well have been written yesterday instead of 1949. With apologies to Mr. White and his publishers, an extended excerpt:
New York blends the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation; and better than most dense communities it succeeds in insulating the individual (if he wants it, and almost everybody wants or needs it) against all enormous and violent and wonderful events that are taking place every minute. Since I have been sitting in this miasmic air shaft, a good many rather splashy events have occurred in town. A man shot and killed his wife in a fit of jealousy. It caused no stir outside his block and got only small mention in the papers. I did not attend. Since my arrival, the greatest air show ever staged in all the world took place in town. I didn’t attend and neither did most of the eight million other inhabitants, although they say there was quite a crowd. I didn’t even hear any planes except a couple of westbound commercial airliners that habitually use this airshaft to fly over. The biggest ocean-going ships on the North Atlantic arrived and departed. I didn’t notice them and neither did most other New Yorkers. I am told this is the greatest seaport in the world, with six hundred and fifty miles of water front, and ships calling here from many exotic lands, but the only boat I’ve happened to notice since my arrival was a small sloop tacking out of the East River night before last on the ebb tide when I was walking across the Brooklyn Bridge. I heard the Queen Mary blow one midnight, though, and the sound carried the whole history of departure and longing and loss. The Lions have been in convention. I’ve not seen one Lion. A friend of mine saw one and told me about him. (He was lame, and was wearing a bolero.) At the ballgrounds and horse parks the greatest sporting spectacles have been enacted. I saw no ballplayer, no race horse. The governor came to town. I heard the siren scream, but that was all there was to that — an eighteen-inch margin again. A man was killed by a falling cornice. I was not a party to the tragedy, and again the inches counted heavily.
I mention these merely to show that New York is peculiarly constructed to absorb almost anything that comes along (whether a thousand-foot liner out of the East or a twenty-thousand-man convention out of the West) without inflicting the event on its inhabitants; so that ever event is, in a sense, optional, and the inhabitant is in the happy position of being able to choose his spectacle and so conserve his soul. In most metropolises, small and large, the choice is often not with the individual at all. He is thrown to the Lions. The Lions are overwhelming; the event is unavoidable. A cornice falls, and it hits ever citizen on the head, every last man in town. I sometimes think the only event that hits every New Yorker on the head is the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade, which is fairly penetrating — the Irish are a hard race to tune out, and they have the police force right in the family.
And a smaller bit from near the end of the piece:
The subtlest change in New York is something people don’t speak much about but that is in everyone’s mind. The city, for the first time in its long history, is destructible. A single flight of planes no bigger than a wedge of geese can quickly end this island fantasy, burn the towers, crumble the bridges, turn the underground passages into lethal chambers, cremate the millions. The intimation of mortality is part of New York now: in the sounds of the jets overhead, in the black headlines of the latest edition.
White was referring to the nuclear threat from the Soviet Union but he could easily have been talking about 9/11, or even the current financial crisis threatening to take down one of the city’s most prominent institutions.
An ode to the short story.
The novel is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor short story to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn’t forget its place — so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. “Hoo ha!” cries the novel. “Here ah come!” The short story is always ducking for cover. The novel buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The short story scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.
Jay Walker made a lot of money and used some of it to finance a ridiculously huge and nerdy library in his house. Wired has a tour.
The massive “book” by the window is a specially commissioned, internally lit 2.5-ton Clyde Lynds sculpture. It’s meant to embody the spirit of the library: the mind on the right page, the universe on the left. Pointing out to that universe is a powerful Questar 7 telescope. On the rear of the table (from left) are a globe of the moon signed by nine of the 12 astronauts who walked on it, a rare 19th-century sky atlas with white stars against a black sky, and a fragment from the Sikhote-Alin meteorite that fell in Russia in 1947—it’s tiny but weighs 15 pounds. In the foreground is Andrea Cellarius’ hand-painted celestial atlas from 1660. “It has the first published maps where Earth was not the center of the solar system,” Walker says. “It divides the age of faith from the age of reason.”
(via design observer)
The AIGA has posted their 50 Books/50 Covers selections from 2007. It’s worth fighting through the stupid Flash interface to check out these covers (click “View the 365:AIGA Year in…” and then on “Book design”). The covers are on display in NYC until 11/26/2008. (via book design review)
Deborah Solomon recently interviewed Charles Murray for the NY Times. Murray is the author of the recent book, Real Education, which argues that 80% of all college students should not be pursuing a bachelor’s degree.
Even though the interview is pretty short, Solomon shows how Murray’s scientific views don’t jibe with his political views, namely that you don’t need smart, able people running the country.
What do you make of the fact that John McCain was ranked 894 in a class of 899 when he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy? I like to think that the reason he ranked so low is that he was out drinking beer, as opposed to just unable to learn stuff.
What do you think of Sarah Palin? I’m in love. Truly and deeply in love.
She attended five colleges in six years. So what?
Why is the McCain clan so eager to advertise its anti-intellectualism? The last thing we need are more pointy-headed intellectuals running the government. Probably the smartest president we’ve had in terms of I.Q. in the last 50 years was Jimmy Carter, and I think he is the worst president of the last 50 years.
The cognitive dissonance inside Murray’s head must be deafening.
Ok, Michael Lewis *is* writing a book about the current financial situation. Sort of. It’s called Panic: The Story of Modern Financial Insanity.
When it comes to markets, the first deadly sin is greed. Michael Lewis is our jungle guide through five of the most violent and costly upheavals in recent financial history: the crash of ‘87, the Russian default (and the subsequent collapse of Long-Term Capital Management), the Asian currency crisis of 1999, the Internet bubble, and the current sub-prime mortgage disaster.
It’s out in December so I imagine that it won’t include the current Lehman/AIG/Merrill/bailout kerfuffle, but that’s what “with new material” paperbacks are for. (thx, paul)
Michael Lewis looks on the bright side of the current financial crisis and finds five positive aspects.
Our willingness to believe that we can hire some expert to tell us how to outperform markets is a big problem, with big consequences. It underpins Wall Street’s brokerage operations, for instance, and leads to a lot more people giving out financial advice than should be giving out financial advice. Thanks to the current panic many Americans have learned that the experts who advise them what to do with their savings are, at best, fools.
God I hope he writes a book about all this someday, sort of a Liar’s Poker 2. He can call it Fool’s Roulette or something.
Finally! The truth about thread count.
In a quality product, the incremental comfort value of increasing thread count over 300 is very little. A 300 thread count can feel far superior to a 1000 thread count. Thread count has become a simple metric used by marketing people to capture interest and impress with high numbers. The problem with mass produced high thread count sheets is that to keep the price down, important elements of quality must be sacrificed, meaning in the end the customer gets a product with an impressive thread count but that probably feels no better (or even worse) than something with a lower thread count.
I am hoping that John Hodgman will shed further light on the thread count controversy (working title: CountGate) in his new book, More Information Than You Require.
Update: Even more about thread count. (thx, jeremy)
Steven Johnson’s new book is called The Invention of Air.
It has an organizing theme of how innovative ideas emerge and spread in a society, while integrating many different threads along the way: 18th-century London coffeehouse culture; the Adams-Jefferson letters; the origins of ecosystem science; the giant dragonflies of the Carboniferous Era; the impact of energy deposits on British political change; the discovery of the gulf stream; the Alien and Sedition acts; Jefferson’s bible; the Lunar Society; mob violence; Thomas Kuhn’s Structure of Scientific Revolutions; Ben Franklin’s kite experiment.
It’s also not, somehow, 6500 pages. I thought for sure that this was going to be some sort of long zoom book, not a book with a long zoom approach.
Michael Ruhlman has some photos of the Alinea book in the wild. Though possibly biased, he says it’s a beaut.
Grant and his partner Nick Kokonas, along with designer Martin Kastner and his wife, photographer Lara Kastner, wanted to do it on their own and so they have. Kastner, I believe a sculptor by trade, had never designed a book. His wife had never photographed a book, food or otherwise. Grant and Nick had never done a book either. And they were told by numerous publishers (in a nasally dismissive tone, Kokonas suggested) that they just didn’t have the skill or experience to do what they wanted to (“Gray pages?! You can’t do gray pages!” “You can’t sell a book like this at that price.”)
As mentioned in the post, the Alinea book is only $31.50 if you order through Amazon.
Before European conquerers arrived, large areas of the Amazon River basin had been cleared away to make room for a network of towns and villages.
The findings raise big questions, says Susanna Hecht of the University of California in Los Angeles.
For starters, it forces a rethink of the long-held assumption that these parts of the Amazon were virtually empty before colonisation. What’s more, it shows that the large populations that did inhabit the region transformed the landscape.
“What we find is that what we think of as the primitive Amazon forest is not so primitive after all,” Heckenberger told New Scientist. “European colonialism wasted huge numbers of native peoples and cleared them off the land, so that the forest returned.”
I’m gonna plug 1491 again…the story above isn’t news to anyone who’s read this book, which argues that there was plenty going on in the New World before Columbus, et. al. arrived.
The author of 100 Things to Do Before You Die is dead at the age of 47. I hope he made it through them all.
Update: I missed this bit of the article:
Freeman’s relatives said he visited about half the places on his list before he died
Likely better than most but still sad.
A British company called Faber & Faber is doing print on demand books with a wrinkle: each book has its own distinct cover that’s generated at print time.
Generating the borders was just one, if major, task of the final solution, though. The custom software written in Processing, straight Java and PHP works as an internal webservice at Faber which receives new batch orders and then generates complete, print ready PDF files with all copy, branding, spine, ISBN, barcode and optional high-res JPG preview using the book details supplied. Generating a single cover only takes about 1 second, but due to its iterative and semi-random nature can sometime require hundreds of attempts until a “valid” design is created which is judged to be “on brand” by software itself.
What a day it will be when software can determine whether all of us are “on brand” or not. (thx, david)
New book from O’Reilly: Statistics in a Nutshell.
Need to learn statistics as part of your job, or want some help passing a statistics course? Statistics in a Nutshell is a clear and concise introduction and reference that’s perfect for anyone with no previous background in the subject. This book gives you a solid understanding of statistics without being too simple, yet without the numbing complexity of most college texts.
They’re making an animated movie of my favorite book from childhood, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
“It’s actually only loosely — very, very loosely — based on the book,” Faris explained. “But it’s about a small town that rains food, basically. So hamburgers come down, and ice cream, and [the residents] have to figure out a way [stop it]. Eventually, it gets more and more dangerous, and they have to figure out a way to stop the satellite machine that’s raining food.”
It stars Andy Samberg and Anna Faris. I’m prepared to be *very* disappointed. (thx, kimberly)
Neal Stephenson’s new book, Anathem, sounds pretty interesting. From Steven Levy’s otherwise unsatisfying profile of Stephenson in the new Wired:
Set on a planet called Arbe (pronounced “arb”), Anathem documents a civilization split between two cultures: an indulgent Saecular general population (hooked on casinos, shopping in megastores, trashing the environment — sound familiar?) and the super-educated cohort known as the avaunt, or “auts,” who live a monastic existence defined by intellectual activity and circumscribed rituals. Freed from the pressures of pedestrian life, the avaunt view time differently. Their society — the “mathic” world — is clustered in walled-off areas known as concents built around giant clocks designed to last for centuries. The avaunt are separated into four groups, distinguished by the amount of time they are isolated from the outside world and each other. Unarians stay inside the wall for a year. Decenarians can venture outside only once a decade. Centenarians are locked in for a hundred years, and Millennarians — long-lifespanners who are endowed with Yoda-esque wisdom — emerge only in years ending in triple zeros.
Shades of Wall-E and Idiocracy. Another tidbit from the article: Stephenson works part-time for Nathan Myhrvold’s Intellectual Ventures building inventions.
BLDGBLOG tells us about Library of Dust, a book of photographs of an Oregon state psychiatric institution.
Esteemed photographer David Maisel has created a somber and beautiful series of images depicting canisters containing the cremated remains of the unclaimed dead from an Oregon psychiatric hospital. Dating back as far as the nineteenth century these canisters have undergone chemical reactions causing extravagant blooms of brilliant white green and blue corrosion revealing unexpected beauty in the most unlikely of places. This stately volume is both a quietly astonishing body of fine art from a preeminent contemporary photographer and an exceptionally poignant monument to the unknown deceased.
In 1997, the BBC aired a three-hour documentary based on Stewart Brand’s book, How Buildings Learn. Brand has posted the whole program on YouTube in six 30-minute parts: part one, part two, part three, part four, part five, part six.
If you’re hesitant about whether to watch the series or not, check out this two-minute appetizer of perhaps the meatiest tidbit in the book: the oak beam replacement plan for the dining hall of New College, Oxford.
(via smashing telly)
Update: An old version of the New College web site says that the oaks were not planted specifically for the replacement of the ceiling beams even though they were used for that purpose. (thx, emily, david, and phil)
Update: Google Video is no more, so I updated the video links to YouTube. (via @atduskgreg)
A collection of books, compiled by Rex, by people who spent a year doing something and then wrote a book about it. Topics include competitive eating, not shopping, and reading the OED.
A collection of old book ads from the NY Times.
We’re going to begin this project with a look at the country’s golden age of book advertisements, which ran from roughly 1962-73. Why those dates? The books - and the ads for them - were terrific: fresh, pushy, serious and wry, often all at the same time. There was a new sense of electricity in the culture and in the book world.
The authors featured include Alice Walker, Cormac McCarthy, Joan Didion, Toni Morrison, and Susan Sontag.
The New Yorker pulled one over on me. The recent Summer Fiction Issue contained a piece (not online) by novelist Haruki Murakami which I skimmed right over, thinking it was a piece of short fiction. Turns out it’s an excerpt from Murakami’s memoir, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running, a book detailing how he became a novelist and an avid runner.
In other words, you can’t please everybody.
Even when I ran the club, I understood this. A lot of the customers came to the club. If one of out ten enjoyed the place and decided to come again, that was enough. If one out of ten was a repeat customer, then the business would survive. To put it another way, it didn’t matter if nine out of ten people didn’t like the club. Realizing this lifted a weight off my shoulders. Still, I had to make sure that the one person who did like the place really liked it. In order to do that, I had to make my philosophy absolutely clear, and patiently maintain that philosophy no matter what. This is what I learned from running a business.
After “A Wild Sheep Chase,” I continued to write with the same attitude that I’d developed as a business owner. And with each work my readership — the one-in-ten repeaters — increased.
In addition to writing his dozen novels, Murakami has also run 26 marathons. The Economist calls the book both puzzling and intriguing and stops just short of recommending it, while the A.V. Club really liked it. The Observer has another excerpt from the book about the author’s ultramarathon attempt.
From an article on a new book written by a woman whose ex-boyfriend has been stalking her for more than a decade, a curious phrase: micro-tampering.
No matter how many times Ms. Brennan changed the locks, she writes, her apartment was entered and subtly rearranged. “I find a bar of soap from the second-floor bathroom on the third-floor kitchen counter,” she writes. “A teaspoon from a kitchen drawer lies on the middle of my bed.”
Update: See also: gaslighting. (thx, alex)
A thoughtful letter from a librarian to a woman who wanted a book depicting gay marriage removed from the children’s section of the library.
I fully appreciate that you, and some of your friends, strongly disagree with its viewpoint. But if the library is doing its job, there are lots of books in our collection that people won’t agree with; there are certainly many that I object to. Library collections don’t imply endorsement; they imply access to the many different ideas of our culture, which is precisely our purpose in public life.
Illustrator Kean Soo and writer Kevin Fanning created a book about the internet for babies: Baby’s First Internet.
Do not stop to think or edit:
You must be the first who said it.
You heard a brand-new band? What luck!
You’ll be the first to say they suck.
I’d read it to Ollie but do 1-year-olds understand cautionary tales?
NY Times columnist David Carr has written a book about his days as a junkie who cleaned himself up only when twin daughters came into his life. The Times has a lengthy excerpt; it’s possibly the best thing I’ve read all week.
If I said I was a fat thug who beat up women and sold bad coke, would you like my story? What if instead I wrote that I was a recovered addict who obtained sole custody of my twin girls, got us off welfare and raised them by myself, even though I had a little touch of cancer? Now we’re talking. Both are equally true, but as a member of a self-interpreting species, one that fights to keep disharmony at a remove, I’m inclined to mention my tenderhearted attentions as a single parent before I get around to the fact that I hit their mother when we were together. We tell ourselves that we lie to protect others, but the self usually comes out looking damn good in the process.
Carr’s book is not the conventional memoir. Instead of relying on his spotty memory from his time as a junkie, he went out and interviewed his family, friends, enemies, and others who knew him at the time to get a more complete picture.
A former colleague interviewed Carr two years ago in Rake Magazine. (via vsl)
After publishing his first book, Mark Hurst offers some tips for would-be authors, painting a not-so-rosy picture of the publishing industry in the process.
You may see now the author’s dilemma. Publishers and bookstores are in it for the money. But you, the author, can’t be in it for the money - it doesn’t pay enough. You should write a book because you believe in it. And that’s the trouble: what you love isn’t necessarily what publishers believe will sell. If you can find a topic that you love and that will sell in the market, well then, go forth and type. You’re one of the lucky ones.
A book by the proprietor of the Waiter Rant blog is finally due out at the end of July.
According to The Waiter, eighty percent of customers are nice people just looking for something to eat. The remaining twenty percent, however, are socially maladjusted psychopaths. Waiter Rant offers the server’s unique point of view, replete with tales of customer stupidity, arrogant misbehavior, and unseen bits of human grace transpiring in the most unlikely places. Through outrageous stories, The Waiter reveals the secrets to getting good service, proper tipping etiquette, and how to keep him from spitting in your food. The Waiter also shares his ongoing struggle, at age thirty-eight, to figure out if he can finally leave the first job at which he’s truly thrived.
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