Jarrett House North: Literature

Free as in beer, Wind as in air

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 16:21:35 GMT

A few comics related links this morning. First, it will be of interests to comics historians, fantasy fans, and my sister that the full archive of Elfquest is going on line for free to mark the comic’s thirtieth anniversary; the archive will fill up over the coming year. That’s a whole lotta Pini, folks. If you thought catching up with the Sluggy Freelance archives took a long time, just wait.

The other freebie is an archive of the original art for the first issue of Elektra: Assassin, written by Frank Miller and lovingly painted by Bill Sienkiewicz. If you think Miller’s later work was weird, intense, and violent, just wait until you feast your mind on this one. (Greg Burgas wrote an excellent review of the series that might lend some context to the art.)

Print on demand from the Internet Archive

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 18:17:44 GMT

Browsing a Wired.com photo feature on the Internet Archive’s book scanning operation, I was struck by this image, showing a self-contained book press. PDF goes in, paperback bound book comes out.

I would pay for a copy of Cabell’s Early History of the University of Virginia, for sure, and maybe even the five-volume centennial History of the University of Virginia by Bruce, which has provided so much material for my Wikipedia articles. I hope they get this capability on line soon.

The library problem

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 12 Dec 2007 17:31:26 GMT

Interesting link from Slashdot regarding one individual’s effort to solve the library problem—also known as, how do you work with 3500 books? I like how they addressed not just the physical issues but also the cataloging questions.

Something to think about when I address my 550+ books...

Ass-kicking Bible verses

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 07 Dec 2007 16:53:49 GMT

Cracked.com is kind enough to provide a listing of the Nine Most Badass Bible Verses, an idea that sounds really silly unless you know your Old Testament. Yep: Samson and Elisha, Original Gangstas. And I have to admit that the verse about David is pretty darned good, too.

I can’t help but think that some of my seminarian friends would be able to flesh this list out considerably. Ideas?

Prologue to Beowulf

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 06:35:56 GMT

And no, not that Beowulf, though I confess the release of the movie got me off my duff to start this project. And not even the Seamus Heaney translation. No, I’m talking about the real thing—the original Old English poem, as it was meant to be experienced—read aloud, in this case, by the great Old English scholar Kemp Malone.

I found a four-record set of Malone reading the whole bloody poem about seven years ago, in a now-vanished record shop in Central Square in Cambridge. The recording, on the once great Caedmon label (now an audiobook label for Harper Collins, with no sign of its back catalog reappearing anytime soon), was made in 1967 and, if the first side is anything to go by, probably drove every undergrad who listened to it completely nuts. Malone’s delivery is even-keeled, and he doesn’t attempt to sell the text, so little moments like the description of Scyld Scefing as a “good king” for his giving of gifts don’t get the reinforcement that the rhythm of the text would seem to indicate. But it’s still a great window onto the roots of the language.

I have a little bonus for this post: a clip from the recording, constituting the Prologue of Beowulf as read by Malone. I digitized the clip from my copy of the record; to date, I’ve only digitized one side of one LP, owing to the time required to do it properly (unlike CDs, vinyl has to be ripped in real time!) Hopefully it’s interesting to at least one person out there.

Prologue to Beowulf, read by Kemp Malone (Caedmon) - Download 2.6MB MP3

Comics roundup: Sikoryak, xkcd, ARBBH

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 22:10:29 GMT

Item: BoingBoing pointed to an R Sikoryak adaptation of Crime and Punishment a la a Dick Sprang Batman comic book. In turn, the Again with the Comics blog post that reprinted the adaption linked to the Masterpiece Comics on R Sikoryak’s site, including a tiny reproduction of my favorite comics adaptation of a literary masterpiece: “Good Ol’ Gregor Brown.” One morning Charlie Brown awoke to find himself transformed into an enormous insect... I actually own that issue of Raw and shared the strip with my English professor in a class on modernity where we were reading the original “Metamorphosis.” Good stuff.

Item: Wired’s profile of xkcd creator Randall Munroe contains exactly one item about Munroe that hasn’t already been linked on BoingBoing: that he used to be a roboticist for NASA.

Item: So Penny and Aggie has been hawking free downloadable reprints in PDF form for a while now. I checked them out, and I was pretty impressed—Wowio’s a nice service and the quality is good, even if it limits you to three downloads per day. But it got me thinking: how much money is in the business model? And who else is on the service? So I started poking around, and all these indie comic books that I remember from when I was in middle school are in there. Like, stuff that was trying to cash in on Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, before TMNT was a movie or even a TV show. Like Dragon (terrible, and terribly I owned the first few issues of it!). And, of course, like Adolescent Radioactive Black Belt Hamsters. And there’s better stuff too: Steve Canyon, Flash Gordon, the Star Trek Key Comics from the late 1960s; and more. Of course they also do ebooks; I just added Civil Disobedience to my queue.

Rag & Bone class of 1992-1993

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 16 Nov 2007 06:21:41 GMT

Thinking about John reminded me to look up some of my other authors from the first three issues.

Mohit Bhasin, whom I served badly with a poor choice of anatomical clip art next to his poem in the first issue, appears to have kept up his dual pursuit of literature and medicine.
Laura MacCleery is at Public Citizens Congress Watch.
Kevin Corrie, our poetry editor, appears to have landed at Planting Seeds Records (if Google is to be believed).
Jennifer Scappettone is on the faculty at the University of Chicago (though she apparently almost didn’t get into poetry thanks to the environment at UVa). She also apparently contributes to the group blog A Tonalist Notes, though I’m still looking for her posts—it’s a large team.
Paul Bibeau’s book Sundays with Vlad: From Pennsylvania to Transylvania, One Man’s Quest to Live in the World of the Undead was published last month. He’s freelanced for a variety of publications and is now the only person I know to have been both an advice columnist at Mademoiselle and an editor at Maxim. I plan to check out the podcast of his speech to the Jefferson Society at my earliest opportunity.
April Thompson is a freelance writer and editor.
Rebecca Dunham is on the faculty at the University of Northern Iowa; her collection The Miniature Room was a T.S. Eliot Prize Winner in 2006.
Carol Golemboski is on the faculty at the Visual Arts Department at UC Denver.
Lailee Mendelson works at Emory and had an article published in Salon a while back.
Tyler Magill is still writing.
Poulson Reed is the sub-dean at St. John’s Episcopal Cathedral in Denver, Colorado.
Jamie Gaughran-Perez is the editor of a zine called RockHeals, among other activities.
Kim Seelinger has been practicing immigration law and teaching.
David Sherwin is an art director, photographer, and musician in Seattle.
Stacy Wray blogs, writes poetry, and is one half of the acoustic band Tumble.

Harry Potter: all over but the movies

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 25 Jul 2007 23:26:22 GMT

I started, and finished, Deathly Hallows last night. Don’t worry: no spoilers from me. Just a note to mark the end of that particular journey.

But one thought: how the hell are they going to make that a movie? Jo hardly managed to fit it all into just one book.

RIP, Kurt Vonnegut

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 12 Apr 2007 20:14:48 GMT

Thanks to Zalm for starting me out right this morning by pointing to Kurt Vonnegut’s obituary. So it goes, indeed.

Yes, I know...

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 17:31:11 GMT

...quite a few meme posts recently. Forgive me: after a long downtime, I still have my blog training wheels back on, and any writing is better than no writing.

So I was tagged by Isis with this book meme:

Find the nearest book.
Name the book & the author.
Turn to page 123.
Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
Tag three more folks.

And boy, you’re going to regret asking me this, because I’m at work and the nearest book is ... well, it could have been worse:

Book: The Tipping Point (Back Bay Books, 2002)
Author: Malcolm Gladwell

p. 123, 5th sentence and ff.:

“Something that stuck in my mind was when Kermit would hold his finger to the screen and draw an animated letter, you’d see kids holding their fingers up and drawing a letter along with him. Or occasionally, when a Sesame Street character would ask a question, you’d hear kids answer out loud. But Sesame Street just somehow never took that idea and ran with it.”

Now in my defense: this is a serious book about what makes innovations and products “sticky” – keeping customers interested in the product offering. But still a kind of random connection...

Tagging: Chris, Zalm, Tin Man.

RIP, William Styron

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 00:09:32 GMT

New York Times: William Styron, Novelist, Dies at 81. While others will remember him for Sophie’s Choice, Lie Down in Darkness, or The Confessions of Nat Turner, I will of necessity remember this writer from my hometown of Newport News for Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness, which he wrote in 1990 about his struggles with depression and which proved (aside from a short story collection) to be his last published work.

When I read Darkness Visible in the early 90s, there were few writers who had addressed the sufferings of depression in a public, accessible, direct way—and virtually no successful ones. Styron’s writing gave me pause as I reflected on its parallels with my own experiences. In retrospect, it has given me hope that depression need not always marginalize the sufferer.

Other encomia to Styron via Technorati.

Chris Baldwin hits the Big(ger) Times

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 31 May 2006 07:10:56 GMT

Bruno artist Chris Baldwin reported on Friday (sorry no permalink) that his should-be-in-every-newspaper comic strip, Little Dee, will be available through Comics.com, United Features Syndicate’s online comics portal, where it can be read alongside Peanuts, Doonesbury, and other greats. It’s not syndication but it’s a huge step. Wired picked up the news yesterday, so I think Chris has more friends in places of greatness than he realizes. Stop by Chris’s page and buy his book to show your support.

Tomorrow's Children

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 04 Jan 2006 22:07:24 GMT

It’s been one of those serendipitious days. A link on Boing Boing about a secret “cornfield” where misbehaving players inside the MMPORG Second Life get banished sent me on a search for the original story. The game makers credit the Twilight Zone, but I remembered reading a short story with the same premise as a kid in elementary school. “It’s a Good Life,” by Jerome Bixby, always scared the hell out of me, but it’s the sort of story that sticks with me to the present day.

Remembering the title of another story in the anthology, “Gonna Roll Them Bones,” I found a pointer to the anthology. Tomorrow’s Children, edited by Isaac Asimov, was full of extraordinarily creepy stories and hit me, as I was busy reading my way through the entire elementary school library, like a ton of bricks. From that point on I was hooked on science fiction, and remember being disappointed that Asimov’s own works didn’t have anywhere near the eerie resonance that these stories did. Based on the reviews in Amazon, it would appear that I’m not the only one who was warped for life by the book—and based on the prices for it on Alibris, it will be a good long time before I can get my hands on it again.

Review: Little Lulu Vol. 6, Letters to Santa

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 06 Dec 2005 23:27:52 GMT

There was an odd comics book adthat stuck in my head as a young comics geek in the 1970s. I still remember three things about the ad: it was a sweepstakes sponsored bythe Clark candy company; it had a big picture of a bunch of Marvelsuperheroes in the middle; and it promised the chance to meet anyMarvel or DC superhero... or “even Little Lulu.” As a comics reader in the 1970s, I had no idea what Little Lulu was, but I knew it didn’t sound as cool as Spider-Man, so I ignored it. What a pity: had I done a little exploring, I might have been exposed to a piece of graphic brilliance.

Little Lulu stands alongside the Carl Barks Donald Duckstories for sheer comic genius told through simple formulas. Where Barks’s drawings were highly detailed and every episode featured a different, highly imagined setting for his cast to explore, Little Lulu,in the hands of writer/layout artist John Stanley and finish artist Irving Tripp, had simple, clean drawings, and only about four storylines: Lulu would get revenge on the boys for something; her friend Tubby would investigate a “crime,” usually perpetrated by Lulu’s dad; Lulu would tell the little neighborhood brat Alvin a story in which a girl would triumph over all odds; and “wild card” stories whereLulu might get into some unspecified trouble with her friends. Within those limits, the comic was brilliant. Lulu serenely sailed above all troubles, got the best of all the boys, and gleefully dealt vengeance on the neighborhood boys. And the art, simple though it is, is a touchstone alongside 50s era Peanuts and Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy for clean, stylized grace.

Now, thanks to Dark Horse, the original Little Lulu comics are being reprinted in chronological order. (Again, Little Lulu seems like the odd man out in a line-up for me, since Dark Horse is known primarily for gritty indie titles like Concrete, Sin City, and Hellboy, as well as for licensed comics like the massively popular Alien vs. Predator and the Star Warstitles.) The Little Lulu series is now up to Volume 6, and all the elements are in place. All the classic story tropes are in evidence here, with Lulu ad Tubby creating chaos for a truant officer, a ghost, a customer at the butcher shop, and of course Lulu’s long suffering parents.

But the best and probably most poignant story in the collection is the title story (which bears no title in the collection itself), featuring Lulu asking for a new doll so she can give her beloved old doll to the poor girl down the street. It’s an old story, but effectively told here, and a nice counterpoint to the commercialism ofthe season.

One minor quibble: as with Dark Horse’s other Little Lulu compilations, all the art is black and white, which detracts a little from the charm of the drawings; otherwise the collection is impeccably done, and will be enjoyed by fans of classic comics and young newreaders alike.

This post originally appeared on Blogcritics.

Splendid Sundays in Slumberland

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 21:46:30 GMT

New York Times: Restoring Slumberland. There’s an eerie synchronicity about reading this article at the same time as Cory Doctorow’s Themepunks serial in Salon. Peter Maresca’s painstaking restoration of Winsor McCay’s century old comic strips, which still stretch the limits of the form in both imagination and quality, and his subsequent decision to self-publish the results seems as brilliantly quixotic as the creation of garden gnomes with face-recognition for providing context-sensitive household memos.

What’s best about the new book is that it’s about a passion for something that was itself insanely passionate. No hack working in syndicated comics today could pull off anything like the imagination and brilliance of a page from this book. Unfortunately, what’s worst about the book is the infrastructure: the book’s website, sundaypressbooks.com, is was pretty much unreachable (it’s back now).

Update: Nice post at BoingBoing citing Glenn Fleishman on the copyright issues involved: “100 years later, the public that granted the limited exclusivity of copyright gets to reap in the greater benefit of cultural heritage being shared more widely.” The ironies abound in this case. Prior to the Dover reprints that surfaced a few years ago, I’m unaware of any collections that appeared while the work was still in copyright. It’s only now that the right audience has appeared to create a work that might spark new interest in McCay’s work.

Julie in the house

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 12 Oct 2005 17:55:53 GMT

I will have to find an excuse to be in Harvard Square Friday night, as the divine Julie Powell (of Julie & Julia) will be giving a reading and dinner at Chez Henri. She also has a great interview in Salon today.

And how could I have neglected to point to her new blog? Good stuff.

Julie & Julia

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 28 Sep 2005 14:14:18 GMT

Yesterday morning, in a fit of serendipity, my iPod shuffled its way over to Christopher Lydon’s 2003 proto-podcast interview of Julie Powell, the Julie of the Julie/Julia Project. By that same fit of serendipity, Julie’s new (first) book, Julie & Julia: 365 Days, 524 Recipes, 1 Tiny Apartment Kitchen, had arrived from Amazon a week or so before. I had been waiting for the right moment to read it; the shuffle play of the interview felt like an invitation.

The title is somewhat misleading. The claimed premise for the book, as for the Julie/Julia Project, is The Project: cooking every recipe in Julia Child’s landmark Mastering the Art of French Cooking, Vol. 1 in a year. In the book, however, the focus is more on how a frustrated writer and temp administrative assistant in New York City came to start the project, and the lessons she learned from Julia Child’s towering example. The shift in focus was welcome, frankly: as much as I would have loved to have a hardcover copy of every blog post that Julie made in the course of that year, getting the perspective on Julie’s life effectively shifts the focus to the wonder of food and cooking and how it can rescue otherwise lost souls.

Interesting, too, that in this book the “Julia” of the project is revealed to be essentially a literary construct, born straight from Julie’s reading of MTAOFC. Julie and Julia never met, and the eventual revelation of the Grande Dame’s position on The Project is a traumatic anticlimax to the Project. But Julie’s constructed Julia is a genius, in the Greek sense: a guiding household spirit who takes Julie’s agonizingly unfulfilling life and turns it into something rich and wonderful through the medium of sauce veloute and calf’s liver and bone marrow.

This, I think, is the genius (in the modern sense) of The Project and of Julie’s book. We all could use a Julia to steer us in the direction of joie de vivre and fulfillment. In the meantime, I’m going to have to go back to our copy of MTAOFC and dive into some of the more ambitious chapters. Kidneys, anyone?

(Every Flavor) Bean counting

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 05 Aug 2005 21:43:41 GMT

Proving once again that if it’s scary and wrong, someone on the Internet will do it: R U Bean-Curious?, a systematic tasting of Bertie Bott’s Every Flavor Beans, the Harry Potter tie-in jelly bean like product. I remember my tasting the beans and thinking the black pepper ones were quite good. (Thanks to Anita for the pointer.)

I become a case study: Business Blogs

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 28 Jul 2005 15:18:28 GMT

I keep forgetting to mention that I have two case studies in Bill Ives and Amanda Watlington’s new Business Blogs: A Practical Guide, one about me as a general blogger and one about the work we did at Microsoft on the Blog Portal. The book is full of practical advice about using blogs in the enterprise for reasons ranging from knowledge management to product management. Thanks to Bill and Amanda for including my experiences. (It’s kind of funny being in the same book, in the same section, as Robert Scoble.)

Intruders in the dust

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 15 Jul 2005 16:25:05 GMT

New York Times: Reviving His Works, on Paper and Plaster. With William Faulkner’s house, Rowan Oak, newly restored to the somewhat eccentric condition in which its owner left it (houseblogger beware! “haphazardly laid pine floors” and “brick patios like wings” that “fostered rot” and “diluted the whole Greek Revival vibe” lurk within), it seems an appropriate time for a confession.

Thirteen years and change ago, I was with the Glee Club on what seemed like a never-ending Tour of the South. We had left Charlottesville, opened in Chapel Hill, proceeded to Athens and Atlanta, and made a stop in Jackson, MI before pulling into Oxford for the night. At that point we were all a little disconcerted to find that Oxford buttoned up its sidewalks at 8:30 at night—and since we had been on a bus for a Very Long Time, we wanted to get out and find something to do. So, while some of the group went off in search of house parties at Ole Miss, a few more literary-minded individuals (I’m not naming names, but I’ve talked about one of them before, and another is now a minister) piled into a car in search of Faulkner’s home.

It was after 10 when we walked up the front drive and found the house. We had joked and laughed in the car, which we left parked at the top of the drive; now we were soberer. I remember it was a moonlit night and we seemed awfully exposed. But it was quiet and still except for the crunch of gravel underfoot; and luminous around us except for the small cloud of dust raised by our feet. We stood at the base of the steps leading up to the back porch—that porch that the writer, between novels, added along with his office, that office on the walls of which was scrawled in graphite and grease pencil the skeleton of a novel; that office in which rests the typewriter that crackled and popped with the writer’s thoughts, now silent.

– It’s a sad house, said the future minister. – It feels as though it’s incomplete and is waiting for someone.

And then there was a pop from inside, a crack as though someone had trod on the floors—those same rough pine floors haphazardly laid by the writer during one renovation or other. We held our breath.

But no ghosts arrived, no night watchman shining suspicious flashlights. And no bleary eyed writer clutching a glass invited us up on the porch.

Now, if Faulkner could read Oprah’s tips on how to get through The Sound and the Fury, I think the house would be doing more than crackling. Probably it would be making sounds more like the advice at the end of Tod Goldberg’s post on the same subject.

There’s a blog about you, Charlie Brown

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 01 Jun 2005 14:15:50 GMT

Or, more precisely, a blog about Peanuts books, namely The AAUGH blog. By the maintainer of aaugh.com, the definitive site for info on Schulz’s published works, the blog is lovingly, if narrowly, focused on such items as which books overlap with which, critiques of new collections, and news of reprints of Schulz’s non-Peanuts work, such as the late 1950s sports strip It’s Only a Game.

First editions

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 26 Apr 2005 16:06:05 GMT

I have succumbed to that illness to which bibliophiles are most vulnerable: first-edition mania. I used to be perfectly happy to go into a bookstore and find a clean well-designed paperback. Now nothing will do but older editions, the closer to a first the better.

Pictured in the Current Reading spot is the latest manifestation of this illness: a 1943 hardback edition of Eliot’s Four Quartets complete with (slightly torn) dustjacket, found in Richmond during a time when Esta and I were supposed to be keeping each other from buying anything. (We were both unsuccessful at that, by the way.) In my defense, my existing copies of the poem were either (a) tattered (paperback edition) or (b) cramped (in the Collected Poems), so of course that excuses getting another copy.

What is it that causes me to go out and do this? This isn’t even my first Eliot first edition; I have a clean Murder in the Cathedral that I found years ago in Georgetown. I think the attraction has to do with several things. First, the typography. There is usually no comparison between the work of a metal press from fifty or seventy-five years ago and modern offset printing. The physicalness of the slight indentations in the paper and the even color are generally far superior. Too, many paperbacks are reproduced in photo offset from the original hardcover settings but with tighter margins, making the page both less legible and more cramped.

And there is a sense of history that often speaks directly to the work. One thing I noticed in this 1943 edition was the color of the paper. Unlike some of my books from the 1920s and 1930s, the paper of this edition had browned like a paperback—because during World War II the only paper that was available had a high acid content (the necessary materials to produce better paper were needed elsewhere for the war effort). Knowing this and holding it in your hands lends an entirely new perspective to Eliot’s poems of loss, time, and redemption, particularly “Little Gidding,” which takes on a terrible concreteness when you situate it in wartime England in 1943:

Ash on and old man’s sleeve
Is all the ash the burnt roses leave.
Dust in the air suspended
Marks the place where a story ended.
Dust inbreathed was a house—
The walls, the wainscot and the mouse,
The death of hope and despair,
This is the death of air.

(Thanks to Tristan for an excellent online text and notes on the poems.)

For a better discussion of the semantic interplay between text and book, check out Jerome McGann’s Black Riders: The Visual Language of Modernism.

Ben Grimm, mensch

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 15:25:12 GMT

I’m having trouble not creating a ruckus while reading Twisted Toyfair Theatre’s Seder Masochism, a touching story of the Fantastic Four’s Ben Grimm—better known as the Thing—discovering his Jewish roots. Amazing costuming job on the various action figures, and hysterical storyline. (Courtesy BoingBoing.)

Alas, Alice

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 21 Mar 2005 16:34:52 GMT

Boing Boing: Andre Norton, RIP. Sad to see a talented writer pass, though she did have a long and productive career (even if I can’t for the life of me pick out the books from that list which I avidly devoured as a preteen). Pause a moment and remember Alice Mary Norton (who in writing for a male dominated audience decided to adopt a male pseudonym).

Meme of the day: Bookshelf

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 14 Jan 2005 17:57:13 GMT

Tony Pierce: bookshelf meme. Normally I don’t play these games, but I can’t resist one that allows me to plug low-tech word distribution mechanisms like books. Instructions: ”Copy the list from the last person in the chain, delete the names of the authors you don't have on your home library shelves and replace them with names of authors you do have. Bold the replacements.”

The list, as received from Tony and updated by me:

Charles Bukowski
Umberto Eco
William Gibson
J.R.R. Tolkien
Mark Twain
James Joyce
Anne Sexton
Doc Searls
William Shakespeare
George Herriman

R.I.P. Will Eisner

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 07 Jan 2005 16:52:14 GMT

It’s been hard to write this one. Will Eisner was such a living legend of the comics field for so long that it’s hard to admit he’s really gone. Especially when unimaginative, fourth-rate artists continue to haunt the pages after his departure. When will we ever see his like again?

Best eulogy: Michael Barrier: Will Eisner: Moved by the Spirit. Best celebrity eulogy: Neil Gaiman. Best obituary: New York Times. Best retrospective of Eisner’s work: his own site.

Another blog-to-book story: Andy Hertzfeld

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 16 Dec 2004 19:21:41 GMT

Wired News: Inside the Mac Revolution. Andy Hertzfeld has taken his great site, Folklore.org, which collected stories from the early days of Apple and the Mac, and published Revolution in the Valley: the Insanely Great Story of How the Mac was Made. Looks cool, even if I have read a lot of it before…

Blogging about books about blogging

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 15 Dec 2004 19:55:34 GMT

New York Times: A New Forum (Blogging) Inspires the Old (Books). The article name-checks all the usual suspects, including Salam Pax, Jessica Cutler, Ana Marie Cox, Belle de Jour, Real Live Preacher, Julie Powell, and Elizabeth Spiers, but misses Tony Pierce (though he did get featured on Screen Savers). The interesting thing is that bloggers may be more interesting to publishers not because their everyday writing is readily accessible for judging but because they come with a built-in audience. So much for the art of literature.

Roy Kuhlman, in 45 tiny pictures

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 18 Nov 2004 00:46:45 GMT

While looking for cover art for my books in Delicious Library, I found this site dedicated to Roy Kuhlman, the graphic designer responsible for those unforgettable covers for the Grove Press and Evergreen paperback lines. As part of a larger site on Grove Press, J. A. Lee has collected scans of 45 different Kuhlman covers, ranging from the sublime to the ridiculous and back to the sublime again.

Optimism in the face of the end of the world

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 26 Jul 2004 02:34:36 GMT

Between Bonhoeffer’s Letters and Papers from Prison and The Day After (which my host is currently watching and I’m failing to avoid), I really need to find something cheerier. Maybe some Joy Division.

—About The Day After. Judging from the IMDB message boards, the kids who didn’t grow up with the Cold War think the movie is pretty hokey. I’d agree with that, watching it again with the benefit of 21 years of better special effects and the end of the Soviet Union. But I also remember that I watched it at the age of 10 or 11. And rode the bus to school with the kids from my neighborhood, who were normally a pretty reprehensible bunch of cut-ups (and some actual delinquents), but on that day everyone was absolutely quiet. Kids talked quietly to each other in their seats. My neighbor from across the street, who was known to beat me up from time to time, talked to me and quoted the Einstein saying that appeared in the movie: “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” Three years later I was still periodically being jolted awake with dreams that the bombs had fallen.

As for today, I’m grateful we no longer face the spectre of imminent annihilation (though I don’t think the alternative of lots of small scale terrorist attacks is much better). I feel fortunate to have lived through the 90s, during which it seemed for a time, prior to September 11, 2001 anyway, that we could think about war and peace on a human scale again, free of the shadow of the Cold War. I think this is part of what is at the root of my opposition to the restriction of our liberties, the reckless headlong plunge toward war in the Middle East, the growing cloud of suspicion (which has gotten so bad that a dark-skinned photography student can be singled out as a possible terrorist for taking photos of one of Seattle’s most notable tourist attractions) of our fellow man: that I have tasted freedom from fear in my lifetime and do not want to surrender to fear once more.

Here Bonhoeffer points the way, in his essay “After Ten Years,” written in 1943 during his imprisonment. Two things he wrote in this essay, after being denied the freedom to publish, to preach, to teach, and ultimately to leave his cell, stick with me in some quiet way:

Surely there has never been a generation in the course of human history with so little ground under its feet as our own. Every conceivable alternative seems equally intolerable. We try to escape from the present by looking entirely to the past or the future for our inspiration, and yet, without indulging in fanciful dreams, we are able to wait for the success of our cause in quietness and confidence. It may be however that the responsible, thinking people of earlier generations who stood at a turning-point of history felt just as we do, for the very reason that something new was being born which was not discernible in the alternatives of the present. …
Optimism: It is more prudent to be a pessimist. It is an insurance against disappointment, and no one can say “I told you so,” which is how the prudent condemns the optimist. The essence of optimism is that it takes no account of the present, but it is a source of inspiration, of vitality and hope where others have resigned; it enables a man to hold his head high, to claim the future for himself and not to abandon it to his enemy. Of course there is a foolish, cowardly kind of optimism which is rightly condemned. But the optimism which is will for the future should never be despised, even if it is proved wrong a hundred times. … To-morrow may be the day of judgment. If it is, we shall gladly give up working for a better future, but not before.

On vendettas and visions of dystopia

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 22 Jul 2004 16:25:55 GMT

Salon: The man who invented the future. Interview with Alan Moore, writer of many “comic book” dystopias, on the odd resonances between many of his works and the current War on Terror. While normally people like to name-check The Watchmen in this context, here the interviewer (Scott Thill) accurately checks the parallels with V for Vendetta:

[Moore]: Fascism is like a hydra — you can cut off its head in the Germany of the ’30s and ’40s, but it'll still turn up on your back doorstep in a slightly altered guise. ... “V for Vendetta” has had an annoying way of coming true ever since I wrote it in the early ’80s. Back then, I wanted something to communicate the idea of a police state quickly and efficiently, so I thought of the novel fascist idea of monitor cameras on every street corner. And the book was, of course, set in the future of 1997. But by that year — and I don’t know if Tony Blair and Jack Straw were big fans, but evidently they thought its design for future Britain was a really good one — we had cameras on every street corner along the length and breadth of the country.

(Aside: I had a ridiculously large comic collection in middle and high school—one of the dubious perks of working at a comic store was not having to go very far to spend one’s paycheck—and V for Vendetta was one of the few works I kept when the rest of the collection was sold wholesale. I would love to say that I was making the connections at a young age, but I doubt I went further with it than the general affinity that the intellectual kid who gets beaten up at the bus stop feels with victims of real oppression, and the gratitude that that same kid feels to those who dramatize the exile that they feel inside. That’s not to say that I wasn’t politically conscious, just that I didn’t always go out of my way to get really informed beyond what I saw and reacted to in the news magazines. Hopefully I’ve learned a few things since then.)

I always felt that, Moore’s vision of the dystopia aside, that his character’s reaction to it—the “vendetta” of the book’s title—was profoundly unsatisfying when you got right down to it. I wonder whether this is a reflection of the sense I have that the book is trapped in British history. The first volume opens with echoes of Guy Fawkes, who is today celebrated for failing to change the order of the world in his attempt to bomb Parliament, and V’s methods don’t really move past that (except directly to murder). There’s no vision for change beyond the ending of the current order and the placing of the people’s fate in their own hands. I guess that Moore’s point was that it should end there, that solving the problems needs to be done by the people rather than by some narrator or revolutionary.

(Link via BoingBoing. More writing and analysis on the work at the V for Vendetta shrine and the annotations by Madelyn Boudreaux.)

Bloomsday festschrift

Tim Jarrett — Wed, 16 Jun 2004 17:03:09 GMT

Today is the 100th anniversary of the events in James Joyce’s masterpiece, Ulysses. The novel, set on June 16, 1904, has been celebrated on that date since its 1922 publication with public readings and other celebrations.

Today’s celebrations, tinged though they are with the heavy handed legal threats of Joyce’s heirs toward “unauthorized public performances,” include an enormous volume of posts around the blogosphere and media. In no particular order:

New York Times editorial: Bloomsday, 1904. Tilting against those who would decry the book for being elitist: “there is really no less elitist novel in the English language. Its stuff is the common life of man, woman and child. You take what you can, loping over the smooth spots and pulling up short when you need to. Dedalus may indulge in Latinate fancy, and Joyce may revel in literary mimicry. But the real sound of this novel is the sound of the street a century ago: the noise of centuries of streets echoing over the stones.”
New York Times Book Review: Bloomsday, Bloody Bloomsday. John Banville spends a page online talking about his youthful efforts to get his hands on a copy of the book, and his consumption of critical response in lieu of the actual tome. Nice anecdote about the first Bloomsday, fifty years ago, which apparently ended after a scuffle between the organizer and a poet and devolved into inebriation.
Village Voice: Happy Bloomsday! The writer points out that there is more than a little of the pagan ritual in the observance of the day, complete with “deep feeling, props, costumes, and food.”
Bookslut points out that Slate’s weeklong Ulysses discussion has no Irish authors, and only one participating author so far.
Bookslut also points to the BBC’s Cliff Notes to the Cliff Notes to Ulysses, so you too can sound like you know what you’re talking about. Amusing with this article to read the Joyce-bashing in the comments thread. These are probably the same bunch of people who think opera is to be endured. Nice comeback by Stephen Fry, though.
BBC: Celebrations mark Joyce anniversary. Indicates that, contrary to earlier reports, there will be public readings on the streets of Dublin of the work.
Seattle Times: Bloomsday’s 100th celebrated in print and with a Seattle reading. The Seattle reading will be at UW, a little bit out of my way and a little out of the spirit of the celebrations.
My own Bloomsday participation, unless I can find an Eastside pub where there is a reading: an excerpt from the Wandering Rocks chapter.
Tom Harpel suggests that at least one other kindred spirit will be at our local Redmond Irish pub, the Celtic Bayou.
Ben Hammersley posts an excerpt of the conclusion of the novel, and points to a new page-a-day Ulysses RSS feed, courtesy Jason White. Holy copyright violations!

Which sets me to a goal for next year, as I fear it’s too late for this one; if I can get a few hundred people to post a page or two of the text to their blog, we could have a virtual Bloomsday reading. Any takers?

North Carolina speechisms

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 24 May 2004 02:42:12 GMT

Ed Cone: Bless His Heart, or How to Speak Like a Native. The political blogger hits some high points of North Carolina dialect, though I will say that “hey” as a greeting is not isolated to North Carolina—I remember it widespread in Virginia (southeastern, Charlottesville and Northern) and it’s equally pervasive in Redmond, Washington. I do have to give him points for calling out other regionalisms, including “people” for family, “tea” meaning sweet iced tea, “might could” as previously discussed here, “like to,” and of course “bless his heart.” And my wife still makes fun of me when I tell her to “mash down on” a button on the remote, meaning to hold it longer than a quick press.

Courtesy Doc Searls.

Wrinkling

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 11 May 2004 04:15:47 GMT

It’s weird to see A Wrinkle In Time as a kid’s Disney TV movie. Good weird, some of the time. But the transformation to the screen makes even the mean stuff of the book, the scenes on Camazotz (which used to give me nightmares as a kid) look cheap and somehow funny.

Madeleine L’Engle agrees:

NEWSWEEK: So you’ve seen the movie?
Madeleine L’Engle: I’ve glimpsed it.
And did it meet expectations?
Oh, yes. I expected it to be bad, and it is.

But for all that, it’s actually not awful. Watching it recalls the power of the book, the tremendous contrast between family and awful hate, the fierce cynicism of IT and its servants and the aching love of family no matter how fragile.

Thom Gunn, to rest

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 29 Apr 2004 03:21:15 GMT

Thom Gunn, British writer transplanted to San Francisco, formalist poet of highly informal topics, is dead. New York Times, SF Chronicle obituaries. Neither captures the full impact of the man and his poetry.

As a young soon-to-be-ex-poet in 1992, I was blown away by The Man With Night Sweats. Such highly formal structure (rhymes, even), on such highly personal subjects. Love, AIDS, mature relationships, all through a lens I had never experienced before (at that point in my life, I didn’t know that I knew gay people), through such highly disciplined language that I didn’t understand it for years. But I already knew it trumped whatever meager potential for highly distilled language I had in me.

Good ol’ Charlie Brown

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 20 Apr 2004 14:06:13 GMT

The long awaited day arrived yesterday, while I was at work. I came home to a rectangular package from Fantagraphics. The first volume of the Complete Peanuts had arrived at last. More thoughts on this joy later, but let me just say that having a hardback Peanuts collection is, well, like a warm puppy. And it has an index!!!!

Needing an open window

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 12 Apr 2004 16:29:10 GMT

At various times in the past I’ve written about my fascination with the work of Joseph Cornell and my experiences with his works. Last night I finished the big collection of his work, Joseph Cornell: Shadowplay...Eterniday, and as always came away both inspired and humbled by the work.

And saddened. William Gibson wrote in Count Zero that the Cornell-manque boxes encountered by the protagonist evoked “impossible distances, loss and yearning,” and Gibson wrote that he sensed autism behind Cornell’s obsessive junk-shop searchings.

I think the truth is closer than that. Cornell’s series of parrots caged in decaying European hotels rings sad when you know he spent his entire adult life in his house in Queens, taking care of his mother and brother. Imprisoned? By choice, if so. But still, looking at the empty bird cage and cut wire of Toward the Blue Peninsula, with its open window in the back of the box, one wishes that Cornell, too, had let himself fly the coop.

Beware the white binding with the red and black letters

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 29 Mar 2004 14:49:03 GMT

Salon: Abridged Too Far. Hilary Flower writes of her unsettling discovery of “abridged” children’s literature through reading the “Great Illustrated Classics” version of Wind in the Willows. Whenever a classic work of children’s literature credits an “adapter” and an editor, look out.

I go Pogo, digitally

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 23 Mar 2004 15:01:28 GMT

New today in the iTunes Music Store: Songs of the Pogo, a recording that Walt Kelly made in 1956 with the help of Norman Monath. You can bet that’s being downloaded right now. Alas, no Boston Charlie.

More early Schulziana on the way

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 08 Mar 2004 18:57:59 GMT

I got a postcard late last week from the good folks at Fantagraphics. Apparently the first volume of The Complete Peanuts has slipped its publication date by a month, to April 1 (no jokes please). But it’s not all bad news. They offered a bundle with a new, first-time-ever collection of all Charles Schulz’s pre-Peanuts work, including both the trailblazing “Li’l Folks” strip and his single panel work. Was I interested? Oh yeah. This is the good stuff, the ur-Peanuts, so to speak, before the characters evolved into their familiar (copiously merchandized) selves.

Side note: I have been consistently impressed with Fantagraphics, both as a publisher (the Krazy and Ignatz collections have been consistently excellent) and as a business with consistently excellent customer support and communication.

Letter to Jack Spicer

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 04 Mar 2004 06:33:41 GMT

Dear Jack,

In your first book, After Lorca, you wrote a letter to Lorca saying you wanted to make a poem out of a real lemon, not the description of a lemon. Very good; Jenny Holzer has done stranger things. You also say

I would like the moon in my poems to be a real moon, one which could be suddenly covered with a cloud that has nothing to do with the poem—a moon utterly independent of images. The imagination pictures the real. I would like to point to the real.

Today we can do that, Jack, kind of. This letter is a poem that points to other poems, other poets. But links break and rot just like your lemon does, Jack, and I’m not sure that what’s left is still in correspondence (as you say with those sly italics) with the lemon.

There are search engines, Jack, whose job it is to help you find the real lemon. Unfortunately, some of them don’t understand me.

I am building a house on sand, Jack, and trying to build it high enough to touch the sky. But the sand keeps slipping out from under me. And my words turn into other languages and are lost.

What to do?

Love
Tim

So much for Bloomsday

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 10 Feb 2004 03:10:38 GMT

Clancy Ratliff at CultureCat points to threats from the James Joyce estate to enforce copyright through lawsuits if there are public readings of Ulysses during the 100th anniversary Bloomsday festivals this June.

For the uninitiated, Bloomsday marks the anniversary of the events of Joyce’s brilliant novel, which all occur on the 16th of June in 1904. The occasion is typically marked by all day readings of the novel in pubs and other gathering places, a typically Irish homage to an otherwise monstrously forbidding work (at least by reputation). The threats have caused the 100th Anniversary celebration to cancel planned readings and performances of Joyce’s works. I can’t imagine that the estate thinks this will help appreciation of Joyce’s work. Maybe it’s time that someone introduced them to the economic concept of “growing the pie” by building demand for Joyce’s works, rather than crouching in the corner muttering “my preciousss” over royalties.

In the meantime, I’m marking my calendar to be violating some serious copyright law on the 16th of June. Care to join me?

Reading the Bible the modern way

Tim Jarrett — Sun, 08 Feb 2004 18:28:01 GMT

I moved the New Oxford Annotated Bible off my Current Reading spot today. This doesn’t mean I’ve read the whole thing; in fact, I’m still working my way through the Apocrypha, which is where I started a month ago. But I was only able to get in a few pages of reading a night, and I was starting to despair of getting any farther.

Serendipitously, Dave pointed today to a site that lets you subscribe to the Bible via RSS. In particular, the site has three different “read the Bible in a year” feeds that give one entry a day with various combinations of Old and New Testament and Psalms.

Hey, if it works with Samuel Pepys, it’s gotta work for the Good Book, right?

Dickens, in easy installments. Again.

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 02 Feb 2004 03:40:01 GMT

Stanford has undertaken a project to digitize the original serialized version of Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations—complete with illustrations, maps, illustrations, context, etc. (courtesy the Shifted Librarian).

Guardian cameraphone article online

Tim Jarrett — Thu, 08 Jan 2004 18:39:57 GMT

The article I mentioned on Monday about the Sent cameraphone art exhibit has now been published on the Guardian’s web site. My photo isn’t shown and I’m not mentioned. Guess I’ll have to check out the print edition; knowing the publishing business, it’s entirely possible I got trimmed for lack of space. It was still cool to be contacted, though.

Agrippa makes it to the big time

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 02 Jan 2004 03:13:52 GMT

The New York Times reports on a new exhibit of letterpress books from the 1990s at the New York Public Library. Among the books listed is William Gibson’s legendary (to some, anyway) book-length poem, Agrippa (a Book of the Dead). This collaboration between Gibson and artist Dennis Ashbaugh, produced in an extremely limited edition, featured photosensitive prints and the text of the poem on a self-encrypting floppy enclosed with the book; the poem could be read once, in theory, and then never read again.

I remember at the time Agrippa came out, when I was in undergraduate at the University of Virginia and a habitué of Usenet, that it was fairly shortly after the publication of the book that the text of the poem was available on Usenet; in fact, it’s still on my hard drive, three Macs later. Gibson himself isn’t complaining: “there seems to be some doubt as to whether any of these curious objects were ever actually constructed. I certainly don't have one myself. Meanwhile, though, the text escaped to cyberspace and a life of its own, which I found a pleasant enough outcome.” His official website has an official electronic text of the poem, including my favorite section of the poem, the transition between the first two stanzas:

“Papa's mill 1919”, my grandfather most regal amid a wrack of cut lumber,
might as easily be the record
of some later demolition, and
His cotton sleeves are rolled
to but not past the elbow,
striped, with a white neckband
for the attachment of a collar.
Behind him stands a cone of sawdust some thirty feet in height.
(How that feels to tumble down,
or smells when it is wet)

II.

The mechanism: stamped black tin,
Leatherette over cardboard, bits of boxwood,
A lens
The shutter falls
Forever
Dividing that from this.

Jefferson’s prescience; Bartram’s spleen

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 29 Dec 2003 18:23:03 GMT

Contrasting notes from my reading over the holiday. I found a passage in Peterson’s Jefferson that I think is pertinent to the current arguments about restrictions of liberty during wartime. Writing during his vice-presidency in the hostile Adams administration during a British war scare, concerning to the Alien and Sedition acts (which entrenched xenophobia in the law and criminalized criticism of the government), Jefferson feared that the intent of the law’s framers was to trick the people into surrendering their power to the government:

The system of alarm and jealousy which has been so powerfully played off in England, has been mimicked here, not entirely without success. The most long-sighted politician could not, seven years ago, have imagined that the people of this wide-extended country could have been enveloped in such delusion, and made so much afraid of themselves and their own power, as to surrender it spontaneously to those who are manœuvring them into a form of government, the principal branches of which may be beyond their control.

On an entirely different topic, Alan Bartram’s Five Hundred Years of Book Design is an ill-titled, delightfully snarky romp through the sacred cows of typographic fame. Slagging such luminaries as Aldus Manutius (“ham-fisted production”), Plantin (“awkwardly aligned spreads”), Franklin (“confusing reading”), Fournier (“a little boring”), Didot (“the well-leaded verse cannot quite decide whether or not to look centred”), William Morris (“ponderous and solemn…the vegetation is beginning to resemble the monstrous growths dreamt up by H G Wells in these same years”), and Bruce Rogers (“effectively incomprehensible…unconvincing pastiche”), as well as a rogue’s gallery of forgotten also-ran book designers, the book applies modern production standards to often lauded works of typography. Of the greats, only Bodoni, Baskerville, and Gill seem to receive consistent praise for their combination of aesthetic and practical concerns. At $35, the book is a bit steep; better reading from the library, I think.

I might could talk Southern

Tim Jarrett — Mon, 08 Dec 2003 23:02:05 GMT

One of the groups I sang with Saturday night was a country and bluegrass group whose leader jokingly told me, “You better speak Southern if you want to sing with us.” I told him, “I might could do that,” in my best Appalachian twang, and got in. Today my Tennessean officemate unconsciously used the same construction, so I started wondering where it came from.

I researched the usage and found the following great article by Tom King about might could:

The use of so-called "double modal" constructions is quite common in the South and Southwest. I come from Dallas originally, and such constructions as you have cited are common there in everyday speech, and they serve a real linguistic purpose: modal forms such as 'could' and 'should' are ambiguous in Modern English, as they have both an indicative and a subjunctive sense. For example, "I could come" can mean either "I was able to come" (past indicative of 'can') or "I would be able to come" (subjunctive). In German, the two forms are distinct: "ich konnte kommen" vs. "ich koennte kommen". The use of double modal constructions with 'may' or 'might' serves to reintroduce this distinction. Thus, for a Southerner, "I might could come" or "I may could come" carry the subjunctive meaning, whereas "I could come" is only indicative in meaning....

The use of double modals in Southern American English fills a gap in Standard English grammar, namely the loss of inflectional distinction in English between indicative and subjunctive modals. Dialect or regional forms are often more progressive in gap-filling than is a standard language. Consider the sad case of 'you', which is ambiguous in Standard English between singular and plural meanings. Here the regional forms have been quite productive: "y'all" in the South (***only plural!!!!***) or similar forms elsewhere.

In other words, twang loud and twang proud.

Good grief, Charles Schulz

Tim Jarrett — Tue, 14 Oct 2003 01:18:05 GMT

Local favorites Fantagraphics announced today that they will begin reprinting the complete Peanuts—all fifty years—with a collection from the first two years (1950 to 1952) to be published next April. The plan is to do 25 books, two a year. I’m most interested by the first book, which should shed some interesting light on the development of the characters in the strip—since Lucy, Schroeder, Linus, and even Snoopy started out as babies. There were fascinating hints of those early characters in the Art of Peanuts collection that was published a few years back.

No way to pre-order, though ISBN (1-56097-589-X), price ($28.95), and cover are given.

Quicksilver: Fleshing out history

Tim Jarrett — Fri, 10 Oct 2003 17:59:21 GMT

I’m only part way through Neal Stephenson’s Quicksilver, despite having worked on it all the way back from Boston. So far, so good: fun, intelligent, and multilayered, with the science of Newton and Hooke present but taking a decided back seat to the intrigues of the royal court and the politics of the Royal Society.

One thing the book has done for me is to greatly increase my enjoyment of Samuel Pepys’s blog/diary. I almost laughed out loud reading the entry from October 7, 1660, in which Pepys relates the story of how the Duke of York initially refused to marry Anne Hyde, and concludes with the tongue in cheek proverb: “he that do get a wench with child and marry her afterwards is as if a man should sh*t in his hat and then clap it on his head.” Not exactly the cold dusty hand of history...

Update: I’m not the only one working through the book, it appears; Matthew Kirschenbaum points to this interview with Stephenson in which it is revealed that the whole book, all 900 pages, was written longhand with pen and paper. Kirschenbaum also rightly dings Stephenson for not pointing out that the preservation of paper documents from the 1600s has something to do with libraries.