For those interested in Luigi Serafini’s Codex, I posted a hack translation of the accompanying «Decodex» that came with the most recent edition.

Drank a half bottle of wine tonight that cost $28 (for the carafe) and tasted EXACTLY like Kool-Aid dosed with brandy. Yes; I’m back in NYC.

— Tim Carmody (@tcarmody) January 29, 2012

Spent too much money tonight on books, booze, and pizza. In other words, happiest guy in the world.

— Frank Chimero (@fchimero) January 29, 2012

Although I don’t mind them, I feel cut off from all the other people in this country — to mention only this country.

— Lydia Davis (@lydia_davis) November 2, 2009

I would need something like a cowboy in order to get away from thinking.

— Lydia Davis (@lydia_davis) November 2, 2009

I AM SIMPLY NOT INTERESTED, AT THIS POINT, IN CREATING NARRATIVE SCENES BETWEEN CHARACTERS.

— Lydia Davis (@lydia_davis) November 2, 2009

To be exhaustive is, of course, an infinite task: more events can always be inserted, more nuance in the narration…

— Lydia Davis (@lydia_davis) November 2, 2009

Fuck bitches. Get money.

— Lydia Davis (@lydia_davis) November 17, 2009

Of course, there are other ways to read Lydia Davis.

Before they protect their predators, victims of trauma (defined as any experience “which by its nature is an excess of what we can manage or bear”) protect themselves by not consciously expressing what happened to them. To articulate, or to say, is to put together, to draw fragments of an experience into a coherent narrative, a potentially devastating process if the experience was so overwhelming as to have been, like the author’s own past, “shattering.” Before a thing is consciously (if not audibly) voiced, it has yet to be acknowledged or owned; it has yet to be believed.

To learn that “the unconscious is structured like a language” is to see this aspect of the self as radically different from the way it is popularly misrepresented, as a murky soup of dream fragments and primitive urges from which it’s possible to fish out the occasional insight, a kind of primordial chaos from which higher consciousness distinguishes itself.

For Freud, Lacan and Rogers, the unconscious is as complex and sophisticated in its organization as is the conscious, and as individual: each psyche requires its own lexicon. Within this mysterious realm that the Jungian analyst Alan McGlashan called a “savage and beautiful country,” Lacan’s voice does hold the power of an archangel’s, and Rogers’s ability to listen and perceive has an equally rare authority. It isn’t everyone who can hear what we don’t allow ourselves to say.

There are used copies of the book on Amazon for under $5.

Tim Mantoani took photographs of famous photographers holding their most iconic images:

The Tank Man of Tienanmen Square. Muhammad Ali standing over Sonny Liston in victory. The portrait of the Afghan Girl on the cover of National Geographic. Many of us can automatically recall these photos in our heads, but far fewer can name the photographers who took them. Even fewer know what those photographers look like.

Tim Mantoani hopes to change that by taking portraits of famous photographers holding their most iconic or favorite photos in his new book Behind Photographs: Archiving Photographic Legends. Mantoani has shot over 150 of these portraits in the last five years, most of which are contained in the book.

The photograph above is Neil Leifer holding his photo of Ali and Liston taken on May 25, 1965.

Update: Tim has a good analysis of what it all means over at Wired:

Now both individual authors and trade and textbook presses can be drawn into a development and publishing ecosystem that begins and ends with Apple. Amazon may offer more eyeballs, but Apple offers an easier workflow. And the multimedia enhancements baked into the new iBooks will tempt everyone creating an e-book to add bits that will be specific to Apple’s platform — creating accidental exclusives.

As part of their TateShots series of artist interviews, the Tate Galleries spoke with Maurice Sendak about his books and career. I love this bit about his subject matter:

I do not believe I have ever written a children’s book. I don’t know how to write a children’s book. How do you write about it? How do you set out to write a children’s book? It’s a lie.

Also, he’s obsessed with William Blake and comic books.

Via: Papertastebuds

Consider the moment in the Confessions when, after hearing and obeying the voice telling him to “take it and read,” Augustine sees the words in what he calls “the book of the apostle” that changed his life. Note first that he can open the book to a random place, something that would have been difficult with a scroll; then, after reading the momentous passage, he closes the book, with his finger inserted to mark the place. He goes, “with a face now at peace,” to tell his friend Alypius what has happened, bringing the book with him, and when Alypius asks to see the passage, Augustine simply opens the book to the place marked by his finger and shows it to his friend. To us such a set of movements is absolutely natural — and yet not so many generations before Augustine the incident could not have played out in anything remotely resembling this famous scene. Nor, to anticipate a later stage in this exposition, would it have played out in the same way had Augustine been using a Kindle.

(thanks, Josh)