Posts Tagged ‘Book’
“Books make great gifts because they have whole worlds inside of them. And it’s much cheaper to buy somebody a book than it is to buy them the whole world!”*…
With this post (and all best wishes for the season), your correspondent begins his annual Holiday hiatus. Regular service should resume on or around the New Year… In the hope that it’s helpful to those still searching for last-minute gifts, this, from the marvelous Tom Gauld…
And as a bonus, this appreciation of Jean Shepherd, the man whose work inspired (and fueled) that yuletide staple, A Christmas Story— and so much more: “The Old Man at Christmas“…
… Most of Shepherd’s career, particularly his first three decades on the radio, relied on riffing and improvisation, which makes for a vast but fairly evanescent archive. People often rewatch classic movies, and sometimes rewatch beloved old TV shows, but they very rarely replay old radio shows. The real marker of twentieth-century success always lay in syndication, and it’s there, a little late in the game, and in a medium that had otherwise eluded him, that Shepherd secured his legacy. In the petty grievances and joys of Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm, in NPR-style storytelling, in everything that straddles the line between countercultural and popular representative of the monoculture, from Calvin and Hobbes to Steely Dan, echoes of his work can be found, so abundant and diffuse they can be easy to miss—but they’re everywhere you care to look…
Daniel M. Lavery in The New York Review of Books
* Neil Gaiman
###
As we read, we might recall that it was on this date in 1882 that an associate of Thomas Edison, Edward Hibberd Johnson (President of the Edison Electric Light Company, a predecessor of Con Edison) lit and displayed the first known electrically illuminated Christmas tree at his home in New York City.
He had Christmas tree bulbs especially made for him–80 red, white, and blue electric light bulbs the size of walnuts, hand-wired around the tree. From that point on, electrically-illuminated Christmas trees, indoors and outdoors, grew in popularity in the United States and elsewhere. In 1895, President Grover Cleveland sponsored the first electrically lit Christmas tree in the White House. And in 1901, the Edison General Electric Company advertised the first commercially-produced Christmas tree lamps (manufactured in strings of nine sockets).
Fun with the Dewey Decimal System!…
Artist Nina Katchadourian has been having fun in libraries since 1993…
…culling through a collection of books, pulling particular titles, and eventually grouping the books into clusters so that the titles can be read in sequence, from top to bottom. The final results are shown either as photographs of the book clusters or as the actual stacks themselves, shown on the shelves of the library they were drawn from.
Readers can explore Katchadourian’s Sorted Book Project.
As we browse with newly-found enthusiasm, we might recall that it was on this date in 1593 that an arrest warrant was issued for Christopher Marlowe, after his fellow playwright– and former roommate– Thomas Kyd accused him of blasphemy. Kyd had been arrested three days earlier, and tortured on suspicion that he’d committed treason. Confronted with heretical documents found in his room, Kyd alleged that they belonged to Marlowe, with whom he had earlier shared the room. The warrant was sworn, and Marlowe was arrested on 20th. He was released on bail, but killed in a bar brawl on the 30th.
Marlowe, a contemporary and rival of Shakespeare, wrote terrifically successful plays (e.g., Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, and The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus) and popular poetry (e.g., The Passionate Shepherd to His Love, and with George Chapman, Hero and Leander). Kyd is remembered for a single work, Spanish Tragedie, which some scholars believe was an inspiration for Hamlet. Kyd died, penniless, in 1593.
Rest in pieces…
source: Packer Gallery
Artist Brian Dettmer explains his “Book Autopsies“:
In this work I begin with an existing book and seal its edges, creating an enclosed vessel full of unearthed potential. I cut into the cover of the book and dissect through it from the front. I work with knives, tweezers and other surgical tools to carve one page at a time, exposing each page while cutting around ideas and images of interest. Nothing inside the books is relocated or implanted, only removed. Images and ideas are revealed to expose a book’s hidden, fragmented memory. The completed pieces expose new relationships of a book’s internal elements exactly where they have been since their original conception.
For more, visit Centripetal Notion and the gallery links there.
As we unsheathe the X-actos, we might wish a Joyeux Anniversaire to Denis Diderot, contributor to and the chief editor of the Encyclopédie (“All things must be examined, debated, investigated without exception and without regard for anyone’s feelings.”)– and thus towering figure in the Enlightenment; he was born on this date in 1713. Diderot was also a novelist (e.g., Jacques le fataliste et son maître [Jacques the Fatalist and his Master])… and no mean epigramist:
From fanaticism to barbarism is only one step.
We swallow greedily any lie that flatters us, but we sip only little by little at a truth we find bitter.
Man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest.
A thing is not proved just because no one has ever questioned it.
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