The Word Made Flesh is officially out TODAY
Hey, guess what? Fourteen months after first announcing our project on this site, The Word Made Flesh: Literary Tattoos from Bookworms Worldwide is as real as a needle driving ink into your skin. Today is Publication Day for us, and my co-editor Eva Talmadge and I want to take a moment to offer our gratitude to all of the HTMLGiant readership. Without your early support, encouragement and re-blogging, this project might well have come to nothing. But instead, we’ve got this full-color anthology of hundreds of tattoos in a panoply of languages from book and body-art enthusiasts all over the U.S. and the world. Eva and I have done a lot of press already, and there’s more coming. I won’t be gumming up the works here at Giant with a running tally, but one of the highlights for us thus far has been our appearance this morning on NPR’s On Point with Tom Ashbrook. You can stream our segment here. Also, many listeners are uploading pictures of their own literary tattoos to a fan gallery that NPR is hosting on their site. We’ve also been getting a lot of new tattoos to our submissions address, tattoolit@gmail.com , and we’ve been posting those on the book’s official site. If you’ve got one (or ten), we want to see it, so please do keep ’em coming in. And thanks–seriously–for everything. Cheers!
Haut or Not: Your Tattoo
One light hug from this “arm of wrath” and suddenly your vision of the future looks rather grim. Imagine this guy on a date: “Hey babe, let me get some more pasta for you, and yah, people are phony and socialist or something, and like the world is gonna end.” The Fountainhead and 1984 were both written as arguments against Socialism, though their meanings have been diluted to vague political restlessness in contemporary culture. I just typed “contemporary culture,” someone shoot me. My prob with books like this (‘cept Catcher – and what the hell is Perks?) is that their didactic agenda overshadows their artistic one. As for Choke and its author Chuck, dunno, that hyped up Red Bull-ish man/boy fascination with violent transgression just doesn’t do it for me.
Rating: Not