10 March 2009
[books] New York’s bright young man grows up … an interview With Jay McInerney …‘Bright Lights, Big City turns 25 this year.’
20 January 2009
[rEDrUM] Finally Published: All Work and No Play Makes Jack a Dull Boy by Jack Torrence … you can buy a copy at blurb.com: ‘If it’s nearly impossible to read, let us take a moment to consider how difficult it must have been to write. One is forced to consider the author, heroically pitting himself against the Sisyphusean sentence. It’s that metatextual struggle of Man vs. Typewriter that gives this book its spellbinding power’
15 January 2009
11 January 2009
[books] 15 Things Kurt Vonnegut Said Better Than Anyone Else Ever Has Or Will … ‘Many people need desperately to receive this message: “I feel and think much as you do, care about many of the things you care about, although most people do not care about them. You are not alone.”‘
10 December 2008
[books] Philip Pullman answers your questions … ‘I am a devout believer in the complete democracy of text. It sounds to me as if you think reading is surrounded by rules and prohibitions and commands. It isn’t! Not a bit of it! Once a book is in your hands, ITS INTERPRETATION BELONGS TO YOU. You can read it in any way you like, and take away any meaning that makes sense to you. That’s the great freedom of reading.’
7 December 2008
[books] Gonzo’s back! … an interview with Ralph Steadman about Hunter S. Thompson … ‘Steadman didn’t go with Thompson on the fateful trip to Vegas, but he was there in spirit. “He thought of taking me, but in the meantime he’d met this lawyer called Oscar Acosta,” he laughs. “They had a lot in common, drugs-wise. So that’s why he decided not to take me. And anyway, as he said, ‘I might need a lawyer!'”‘
3 December 2008
[comics] The End … Michael Lewis on Wall Street – twenty years after he wrote about it in Liar’s Poker …
‘This was what they had been waiting for: total collapse. “The investment-banking industry is fucked,” Eisman had told me a few weeks earlier. “These guys are only beginning to understand how fucked they are. It’s like being a Scholastic, prior to Newton. Newton comes along, and one morning you wake up: ‘Holy shit, I’m wrong!’”‰” Now Lehman Brothers had vanished, Merrill had surrendered, and Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were just a week away from ceasing to be investment banks. The investment banks were not just fucked; they were extinct.’
1 December 2008
[books] The dumb, dumb world of Malcolm Gladwell … Andrew Orlowski tears into Malcolm Gladwell and fans … ‘Gladwell is a walking Readers Digest 2.0: a compendium of pop science anecdotes which boil down very simply to homespun homilies. Like the Digest, it promises more than it delivers, and like the Digest too, it’s reassuringly predictable. The most famous book Tipping Point, takes an epidemiological view of social trends and throws in a bit of network theory. You won’t draw anything more profound from this than “we’re all connected” – gee! …’
16 September 2008
[books] Robert Heinlein’s Fan Mail Form Letter … a 1960’s solution for authors dealing with fan-mail …
1 September 2008
[books] Philip Pullman’s essential reading list … includes a couple of comics … ‘The Castafiore Emerald by Hergé – Hergé was the best at everything: plots, draughtsmanship, jokes, characterisation, timing – he could do the lot, and this is his best book.’ [via Robot Wisdom]
21 August 2008
[books] Novelist Neal Stephenson Once Again Proves He’s the King of the Worlds … update on what Neal Stephenson is up to …‘That’s right-brain surgery is one of the things Stephenson is tinkering with. He and his team are helping refine some mechanical aspects of a new tool, a helical needle for operating on brain tumors. It’s the kind of cool job one of his characters might have.’
6 August 2008
[bdj] Ask a call girl … Salon asks three American High-Class Call Girls: How Realistic is the Belle de Jour TV Series? (compare and contrast with the time the Guardian asked Cynthia Payne the same question) … ‘I guess as an ex-call girl, it’s fun watching the show and seeing what is real and what’s completely off. I think it glamorizes the business a bit. Being a high-class call girl is a cool life if you know what you’re doing, but a very hard life too, which I don’t think they depict well on the show — just how stressful it really is.’ [via Fimoculous]
7 July 2008
12 May 2008
[007] The name’s Ronson, Jon Ronson … Ronson follows one of the journeys of James Bond …
I phone Zoe Watkins at the Ian Fleming Centre, the literary estate. She’s known within Bond circles for having an encyclopedic knowledge of the books.
“I want to recreate a great Bond journey,” I say. “I want to take a passage from one of the novels and assiduously match Bond car for car, road for road, meal for meal, drink for drink, hotel for hotel.”
“What a wonderful idea,” she says. “But which journey do you want to recreate?”
“I dunno,” I shrug. “One in Moonraker?”
“Moonraker is basically a drive from London to Margate,” Zoe says. “Fleming’s fans were disappointed by the absence of exotic locations.”
2 May 2008
[movies] Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001 Diary … the diary entries concern the time he spent working with Stanley Kubrick on 2001 …‘July 9. Spent much of afternoon teaching Stanley how to use the slide rule — he’s fascinated.’
2 April 2008
[books] The Return of Neal Stephenson … ‘Stephenson, author of Snow Crash, Cryptonomicon, etc., you know who he is, has a new novel out this September. It’s called Anathem…’
15 March 2008
[books] The 100 Best Last Lines from Novels … ‘P.S. Sorry I forgot to give you the mayonnaise. -Richard Brautigan, Trout Fishing in America (1967)’ [via Kottke]
9 March 2008
[42] What on earth is 42? … BBC News on the Answer to Life, The Universe and Everything … ‘The answer can be interpreted in two ways. One is that it is a bad joke, implying that there simply is no answer, no meaning, no sense in the universe, and you would be no worse off if you jumped into the nearest black hole. But the other interpretation is that the joke was wise. It shows that seeking numerical answers to questions of meaning is itself the problem. Digits, like a four and a two, can no more do it than a string of digits could represent the poetry of Shakespeare.’
2 March 2008
[wikipedia] Nicholson Baker on The Charms of Wikipedia … ‘Without the kooks and the insulters and the spray-can taggers, Wikipedia would just be the most useful encyclopedia ever made. Instead it’s a fast-paced game of paintball. Not only does Wikipedia need its vandals-up to a point-the vandals need an orderly Wikipedia, too. Without order, their culture-jamming lacks a context.’ [via Metafilter]
1 March 2008
[books] 50 Crime Writers To Read Before You Die … ‘We wanted to compile a list of writers we had, jointly and severally, loved. We wanted to include writers like Dashiell Hammett, who brought something new and exciting to the genre; like Elmore Leonard, who turns an old trick in it with incomparable style; and like Poe, who invented it. We did not, except incidentally, take into account popularity.’ [via Metafilter]
20 February 2008
[books] Youth of Today — Charlie Stross wonders about the what his future readers will be like … ‘There have always been cameras in shops and schools and other public places, although there are more of them than there used to be. Old folks grumble about privacy, but really, you’re being watched wherever you are. If you don’t like it, get a hoodie.’
9 January 2008
18 December 2007
[funny] Porn For Girls By Girls.com — another spoof website from The Internet Now in Handy Book Form …
17 December 2007
[kipple] Philip K. Dick on Kipple — brief 43 Folders post on Kipple … ‘I think kipple is the main problem with my computers. It’s not just adware (on the Windows box), but the weird little things that wind up in the nooks and crannies. Installers for demoware. Photographs of children. Zipfiles loaded with mp3s… of songs that I already have in other directories, or on other machines, or on CDs on the shelves on my walls.’
22 November 2007
[evil] Ask Mefi: What fictional evil has great corporate branding? … ‘OCP, Omni Consumer Products. From Robocop.’
21 November 2007
[books] Interview with William Gibson from Rolling Stone … ‘The very first time I picked up a Sony Walkman, I knew it was a killer thing, that the world was changing right then and there. A year later, no one could imagine what it was like when you couldn’t move around surrounded by a cloud of stereophonic music of your own choosing.’ [via Kottke]
26 October 2007
[books] Children’s Books You’ll Never See … ‘The Magic World Inside the Abandoned Refrigerator’ [via linkbunnies.org]
18 September 2007
[books] The legacy of Hollywood’s favorite sci-fi writer — The Los Angeles Times on Philip K. Dick … ‘When was the last time Hackett saw her father? Well, in a way it was 2005. That’s when a team of scientists — all of them among Dick’s many devotees in the wired world — put his face on an eerie android with lifelike skin, camera eyeballs and an artificial intelligence that allowed it to recognize old friends. When Hackett saw the face she almost fainted…’
17 September 2007
[books] What single book is the best introduction to your field (or specialization within your field) for laypeople? — great list from Ask MetaFilter … ‘This is, almost certainly, the most expensive thread in the history of Ask.Metafilter.’
1 September 2007
[comics] Edgar Allan Poe — Allergic to alcohol? — nicely done short comic biography posted on Scans Daily …
13 August 2007
[books] Space to think — the Observer interviews William Gibson … ‘I’m reminded of something Gibson once said: ‘I didn’t imagine that art girls in the Midwest would be flashing their tits in cyberspace… but I’m glad that they’re doing it.’ Does he retain that optimism? ‘You could say, in some ways technology and entertainment culture does not look that good from outside. I mean, if you looked at the internet objectively, sometimes you would think it was just a tsunami of filth, something you would not want anywhere near your children.’ It is though, he believes, an intimately human form of culture. ‘I think that one of the things that sets us most thoroughly apart is the ability to preserve our individual memory. The information of the cave paintings becomes Borges’s library, Borges’s library becomes a laptop computer.’ The internet is the shared memory of the species.’
5 July 2007
[blogs] Lowdham Book Festival Lecture Notes — Mike of Troubled Diva’s guide to Blog-to-Books… ‘There is something which has recently come to be seen (in certain quarters) as the Holy Grail to which every personal blogger must aspire. Two little words, which have an almost mystical hold over certain sections of the blogosphere… …and I’m going to say them now… BOOK DEAL!‘
27 June 2007
[books] Henry Raddick’s Amazon Reviews — spoof book reviews on Amazon. Raddick reviews
God, Why Did Dad Lose His Job?: … ‘A truly wonderful guide which has enabled me to explain my recent sacking for vandalising company property to my children in terms of a minor act of redemption. First rate.’
13 June 2007
[books] The Digested Read: God is Not Great by Christopher Hitchens … ‘The purpose of this book is not to prove God does not exist; it is to prove I am cleverer than Richard Dawkins.’
12 June 2007
[books] TwitterLit — neat idea – twittering the first lines of books … ‘Albert Einstein was born in 1879, in Ulm, Germany, with a head shaped like a lopsided medicine ball.’
4 June 2007
[books] Sci-fi writers join war on Terror … ‘”We’re well-qualified nuts,” says Jerry Pournelle, co-author of the best sellers Footfall and Lucifer’s Hammer and dozens of other books. […] During a coffee break at the conference, Walker, Bear and Andrews started talking about the government’s bomb-sniffing dogs. Within minutes, they had conjured up a doggie brain-scanning skullcap that could tell agents what kind of explosive material a dog had picked up.’
18 May 2007
[books] Spoof Amazon Customer Reviews for Richard Littlejohn’s New Book: ‘After reading this searing deconstruction of our liberal, permissive society, I was almost blind with rage. And so I followed Littlejohnson’s example and did the only thing open to a red-blooded, patriotic Briton: I buggered off to America. Luckily, before I left I went out speeding one last time and managed to run over an immigrant, who I believe was also homosexual – as is my God-given right as an Englishman. God bless you, Littlejohnson, God bless you.’ [via qwghlm.co.uk]
5 May 2007
[books] Long Zoom: Interview with Steven Johnson — he discusses his book The Ghost Map amongst other things … ‘I called up my editor and he asked, “How’s it going?” I replied, “It’s kind of like Emergence, you know, if Emergence were a disease thriller.” And he said, “Yeah, it’s like Emergence if the slime molds started killing people in chapter four.” And that became my mantra as I was writing it: “Just think Emergence with killer slime molds and you’re golden.”’ [via Kottke]
25 April 2007
[blogs] The Diary of a Nobody, as a daily weblog … ‘This is a weblog version of The Diary of a Nobody, written by George Grossmith and originally serialised in Punch magazine in 1888 and 1889. Bringing Charles Pooter into the 21st century, his diary is now available as a selection of weblog-style RSS feeds which you can subscribe to…’ [via As Above]
9 April 2007
[self-help] Ask Metafilter: What is the dumbest, funniest, most peculiar piece of advice you have ever found in a self-help book? … ‘From the worst ‘How To’ book on screenwriting ever written (“How to Write a Movie in 21 days” by Viki King): WEAR YOUR LUCKY SOCKS.’
17 March 2007
[books] Douglas Coupland on bloggers, YouTube and Bubble 2.0 … ‘In the future, all these kids now with MySpace pages who put absolutely everything out there, like number of tampons they used, everything, in 40 years there’ll be a political culture where stuff like that, minor details, don’t shock anymore. Now in the States if you hire a maid who doesn’t have her papers you have to withdraw from politics. I hope I live to see the day when stuff like that doesn’t matter, but at the moment I think after a certain age – I tag it arbitrarily at 22 – everyone’s more withdrawn in fear.’
16 March 2007
[blogs] Shaggy Blog Stories — Mike at Troubled Diva has succeeded in publishing a collection of funny blog stories for Comic Relief in a week. Buy a copy Here … ‘Make no mistake: this is one absolute BELTER of a book: a showcase of British Blogging at its finest. Most of the entries, and indeed many of the submissions which didn’t make it to press, have made me laugh out loud. Sometimes, I have been in stitches. Yes, that might have been simple hysteria. But never has hysteria felt so sweet.’
12 March 2007
[blogs] Shaggy Blog Stories: a collaborative blog-stunt for Comic Relief — Mike at Troubled Diva is producing a self-published book of funny blog-entries from UK Bloggers for charity. (Submission deadline is 6pm tomorrow night – so don’t procrastinate about entering!) … ‘Occasionally, in my more delirious moments, I feel like the Anneka Rice of British blogging. At the Nottingham blogmeet on Saturday afternoon, I was tempted to run into the bar in a canary yellow jumpsuit, squawking “OK gang, we’ve got SEVEN DAYS to WRITE A BOOK!”‘ [quote from Mike’s Progress Report]
3 March 2007
[comics] Ask Metafilter: What’s the appeal of Catch-22 by Joseph Heller? … ‘The disillusionment portrayed in Catch 22 is symbolic of the disillusionment that was forming in the American conscious throughout the 20th century. Just look at Vietnam, a war that began just a few years after Catch 22’s publication. And I would say that the same ideas are still with us, maybe growing. Our Presidential and congressional leaders seem just as incapable of hearing the truth as any authorities in Catch 22. All one can do is navigate through the bureaucracy, using its illogical rules to our own advantage whenever possible.’
5 February 2007
[books] The Naked Truth: Authors Who Write in the Buff. … ‘When Victor Hugo, the famous author of great tomes such as Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre-Dame, ran into a writer’s block, he concocted a unique scheme to force himself to write: he had his servant take all of his clothes away for the day and leave his own nude self with only pen and paper, so he’d have nothing to do but sit down and write.’ [via Quiddity]
31 January 2007
[comics] Warren Ellis, Novelist — Ellis on his new book Crooked Little Vein … ‘I sat down and wrote the first ten thousand words of an utterly unsaleable novel. I figured I could recycle the material into comics later. So I handed her this horror of a thing, complete with Godzilla Bukkake scene, and said, take this and leave me alone. Thinking, obviously, that she’d decide I was insane and never bug me again. Two weeks later, she phoned to tell me she’d sold it to Harper Collins in New York…’
21 January 2007
[gladwell] Open Secrets — Malcolm Gladwell on Mysteries, Puzzles and Enron … ‘The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large. The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much.’ [via Kottke]
5 January 2007
[books] The Great Right Place: James Ellroy Comes Home — Ellroy on returning to LA… ‘My mother was murdered. The crime was purely L.A.-adjacent. It was a hot Saturday night. She was out with a man. He strangled her and dumped her on an access road. I was in the real-L.A./safe-L.A./now-non-safe-forever-L.A. that weekend. The central event of my life occurred off-page. The crime remains unsolved.’ [via BeaucoupKevin]
26 November 2006
[books] Robert Pirsig Interview — a wide-ranging discussion with the author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance … ‘He says that ever since he could think he had an overwhelming desire to have a theory that explained everything. As a young man – he was at university at 15 studying chemistry – he thought the answer might lie in science, but he quickly lost that faith. ‘Science could not teach me how to understand girls sitting in my class, even.’ He went to search elsewhere…’
24 November 2006
[books] Digested Read: In Search of Perfection by Heston Blumenthal … ‘Black Forest Gateau has an undeserved reputation as a dessert for chavs. My extensive research, both in Germany and at the Fat Duck development kitchen, has proved that Toscano Black 63 chocolate, when combined with cherries soaked in the urine of adolescent male squirrels, is a feast for the senses.’ [Related: In Search of Perfection on Amazon]