First time I’ve seen one of my book covers projected in front of an audience. A photo from the National Book Critics Circle. Wow. Here’s more about Daniel Mendelsohn’s fantastic book. 

First time I’ve seen one of my book covers projected in front of an audience. A photo from the National Book Critics Circle. Wow. Here’s more about Daniel Mendelsohn’s fantastic book. 

Things I’ve Done While Not On Tumblr

image

Hey! It’s been awhile. Here’s what I’ve been up to:

  • A lot of napping. See the photo above. That’s Theo’s powdered donut impression, and it’s uncanny. 
     
  • I redesigned my website. Chances are that you have ever even seen it, so it’s here.

    The old site didn’t link to my writing, just book-design stuff because I hadn’t given enough thought to how to represent both. Having this resolved is one of the best things I’ve ever done for myself, other than buying CDs and videos at Kim’s Video in the east village or, I don’t know, eating kale. 
     
  • I moved! Since moving here twelve years ago, I’ve lived in Williamsburg, Bushwick, Sunset Heights, Brooklyn Heights, and now, Park Slope. This means I’m eligible for a free latte or a tattoo, or a tattoo of a free latte. 
     
  • I submitted my book to an agent. For the last five or so years, I’ve been writing a children’s book and, other than keeping track of all the revising, sending it out is one of the hardest things I’ve had to do. I’m getting ready to do it again. 
     
  • I started a new project, that I’m very excited about, but likely won’t be finished for at least another month. It’s a new kind of thing for me, but also an old kind of thing. Let me explain … 

    When I first moved to New York in 2000, my first job was typesetting books for a small publishing house. In my spare time, I made little zines of my writing, and friends’ writing, and it was a lot of fun. But then something happened, and I just kind of stopped doing that. I wanted to do writing or design, or at least, I wanted my design clients to think I was serious and not just dabbling in vanity projects. I’d also been on a job hunt and was kind of eager for any me-related Google searches to lead to a very earnest and employable young man. 

    The thing is, that’s just not any fun. And once you get used to trying to not do things it’s a slippery slope. Anyway - - there’s a new project, and I’ll be talking about it here, soon. 

Anyway, thanks for reading this. More anon. 

The Hidden Motivations of Video Game Characters

Hey! I’m on the Awl, with a list of the Hidden Motivations of Video Game Characters. Check it out. My favorite is #12 … 

A Different Stripe: "If messages from beyond the grave had not existed in 1848, it would have been necessary to invent them."

The mental chaos of the time required a catalytic agent, a power which would give all ideas coherence and order. Liberal theology had quarreled with the ancient specifications of life after death, and had failed to provide new ones. Liberal science-animal magnetism, cures by visions-having…

I blogged about P. T.  Barnum and the Fox Sisters today, so I’m re-blogging here to celebrate.

Kinda’s typographical work on NIM is just so good - - if you haven’t seen it, you should! kidna: televandalist: Amendment 64!  Initiative 502! I made that!

Kinda’s typographical work on NIM is just so good - - if you haven’t seen it, you should!

kidna:

televandalist:

Amendment 64!  Initiative 502!

I made that!

nyrbclassics:

On November 11, 1933 a young Billie Holiday made her recording debut.  

Holiday is described in Sleepless Nights, by Elizabeth Hardwick:


She seemed for this moment that never again returned to be almost a matron, someone real and sensible who carried money to the bank, signed papers, had curtains made to match, dresses hung, and shoes in pairs, gold and silver, black and white, ready. What a strange, betraying apparition that was, madness, because never was any woman less a wife or mother, less attached; not even a daughter could she easily appear to be. Little called to mind the pitiful sweetness of a young girl. No, she was glittering, somber, and solitary, although of course never alone, never.

On Werewolves

nyrbclassics:

The dead are turned into werewolves until forty days after their death and, stealing indoors at night, they eat the dough out of the kneadingtroughs—any trough that is empty when it should be full is a werewolf ’s work.

Page 83 of Mani, by Patrick Leigh Fermor

On Pauline Kael

She was drawn to comedy because it always finds shortcuts to the awful truth. Most heroines of the screwball Thirties radiate a brashness and candor that can seem a blueprint for Kael’s critical persona, and here especially Stanwyck’s portrayal of a feisty woman trusting the evidence of her own senses—against a man spouting art-school clichés—almost foretells Kael’s career. “We generally become interested in movies because we enjoy them,” she wrote in her brilliant 1969 essay “Trash, Art, and the Movies,” “and what we enjoy them for has little to do with what we think of as art.”

Jana Prikryl on Pauline Kael in the New York Review of Books. This idea Kael as writer-as-character is essential to understanding any writer and I think it sheds a lot of light onto her contrarian image. 

A Different Stripe: Chris Marker's Book Covers

nyrbclassics:

The filmmaker Chris Marker (La Jete, Sans Soilel, The Case of the Grinning Cat) worked on many of the titles in this series of book covers. ViaLight Industry:

Chris Marker worked for the publishing house Editions du Seuil in the 1950s and, among other projects, he was…

Most of the things we laugh at aren’t even jokes, anyway. They’re someone mishearing a question and giving the wrong answer, or the perfectly timed familiar expression inserted in an out-of-context moment, and so on. The whole “you had to be there” story that was funny when it happened, but isn’t funny any more. You can’t really get spontaneity with graphic design, not only because it’s so planned out beforehand but once it’s down on paper, it’s the opposite of spontaneous.

—Sam Potts