Over at Design Observer, John Gall has shared this cool project of redesigned Nabokov book covers, which he created by taking photographs of specimen boxes. The boxes were assembled by a variety of designers, whom he names in the post. Have a click over.
(via @parisreview)
If there’s a musician out there today writing more literary lyrics than John Darnielle, the great dark Chekhovian pen, voice and guitar at the center of The Mountain Goats, I haven’t heard her or him. (And don’t come near me with that Decembrists shit.) To help mark the occasion of the release of a new Mountain Goats album (their 17th studio effort), The Life of the World to Come, I asked extreme Goats enthusiast Alec Niedenthal to write a piece about the band’s body of work. Click through and find yourself in the life of the world of Alec’s capable, busy hands.
Someone collected intertitle screens in Godard’s films. Yeah, Godard. But this is fun. [via notcoming]
In the interest of a year of interesting book but blank systems, please comment with one title of a book released in 2009 that you really enjoyed for whatever reason. This will in some way form not a ‘best of’ list, but a reference tablet for enjoyable new text.
Did you follow that headline? New from Mal-o-Mar Editions is a poetry split– Jon Leon’s The Hot Tub and Dan Hoy’s Glory Hole, together in one spine. You might remember Jon from Hit Wave, the wonderful chapbook he did for Kitchen Press, and Dan Hoy is of course the co-editor of Soft Targets, the journal that did one (two?) legendary issue(s) before apparently winking out of existence, though it, like Jesus, may yet one day return. Anyway, to celebrate the Leon-Hoy Pact (it’s like the Glass-Steagall act, kind of) I thought it would be nice to pair some of their poems together, in little flights. We were doing this the other night at my house–me and some friends, getting slowly loaded on asscheap bourbon and reading these proudly defiant poems of obscene opulence and opulent obscenity aloud to one another. Fun starts after you click the button.
Beefheartian documentary on Captain Beefheart, also at Ubu:
This evening I noticed that Kevin Sampsell posted a facebook update about how he was firming up tour dates for February…which got me thinking about book tours for indie writers…which got me wondering if there existed any kind of Reading Series Database — like an index where indie writers/publishers could go to find opportunities to read from their books. I couldn’t find anything like that, so I thought I’d ask y’all to maybe help contribute to an informal list in the comments here — is there a Reading Series in your town? For folks in NYC or San Francisco, I assume there are many — what are they/where are they? Outside those big city hubs, is there a venue for indie writers to read in your town?
We are perhaps permitted tragedy as a sort of merciful comedy: because the frantic energy of divine things would knock us down like a drunken farce. We can take our own tears more lightly than we could take the tremendous levities of the angels. So we sit perhaps in a starry chamber of silence, while the laughter of the heavens is too loud for us to hear.
– Orthodoxy