Square Magazine Issue 2
I was lucky enough to get some of my images published in this great on-line magazine which is dedicated to the square photographic image.
the world’s thirstiest gerbil
For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss–a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.
– Molly Ringle, winner of the latest Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest
Rest in Peace, Ben Sonnenberg
Ben Sonnenberg, whose whims and myriad enthusiasms made Grand Street, the quarterly he founded in 1981, one of the most revered literary magazines of the postwar era, died Thursday in Manhattan. He was 73.
“imagine, if you will, sitting down to your morning coffee, turning on your home computer to read the day’s newspaper…”
This has been floating around a bit, but it’s worth seeing if you haven’t yet. (thanks for the reminder, Tom)
“PAPER SMELLS NICE I READ IT IN THE TUB”
Our India presented her graduate thesis yesterday. I watched the video, then read the transcript, and now I’m in total awe and appreciation of her. Come, join me.
People read e-books all the time, but they don’t realize that they’re doing it; they don’t think of that as electronic reading. And I’m concerned with what does this do to us, to read in a different medium. Because the medium, as we’ve heard, is at least part of the message. And what does it mean when you switch from a medium where you have a sense of space in it, and you can tell how far you are through it, and you maybe have a physical sense of where on the page something that you read is, so that you can find it again, to a device where, yeah, sometimes you can search [...]
And there’s also been a very good essay written about how library research is changed by using things like search. If you put in the same terms, everyone finds the same thing, over and over. Whereas in the normal course of library research there is an element of serendipity. You see things on the stacks, what you notice depends on how tall you are, perhaps; depends on whether the thing next to it was shelved in the right place. And so we’re losing this randomness. And randomness may be part of what creates our knowledge—odd things rubbing up together and giving us ideas.
Gordon Lish: Collected Fictions
For those who like that sort of thing, that is the sort of thing they like.
(Via @orbooks | http://ORBooks.com)
NOON
Harvard Book Store gets Espresso Book Machine
What forward-thinking authors and publishers are after is a means of leveraging the “long tail” principle, which holds that declining distribution and inventory costs have made it possible to profit by selling tiny quantities of many different products rather than—as was formerly the rule—immense quantities of only a few products. By bridging the still-pronounced divide between electronic and “tangible” publishing, advances like the Espresso Book Machine could represent the realization of this model in the familiar space of the bookstore. “Even with conservative assumptions about demand, we will profit from this service,” Heather Gain, marketing manager of the Harvard Book Store, told Bookselling This Week.
See Poets & Writers article here. Heads up, Andrew–although you have probably already seen this article.
Roman Lisquidation
It’s official.
Whether this is one step closer to a goat remains to be determined. If any of y’all ‘ve been meaning to get some Calamari now’s the time.
Let a Professional Do It
When I posted this, the phrase “insert in post” caught my eye.
“There is a marvelous peace in not publishing”
So what about the safe?
The Salinger camp isn’t talking.
Author-editor Gordon Lish, who in the 1970s wrote an anonymous story that convinced some readers it was a Salinger original, said he was “certain” that good work was locked up in Cornish.
Lish said Salinger told him back in the 1960s that he was still writing about the Glass family, featured in much of Salinger’s work.
Among other speculation.
Mo’forum in Paris this weekend
I have a habit of wandering into rooms and buildings on my walks around a city and while in Paris last November I wandered into this huge drawing/zine expo by the Canal St. Martin. I took one of these flyers announcing what looks like the same arrangement again, happening this weekend, so if you’re in Paris you might want to have a look in.
That’s it.
I’m moving to New Zealand.
(Via @thebookdesigner)
Sendak Documentary on HBO
Lance Bangs and Spike Jonze have created a remarkable short documentary, Tell Them Anything You Want: a Portrait of Maurice Sendak. In a mere 41 minutes, Sendak–presented through the sublime filmmaking abilities of Jonze and Bangs–captures what it means to be an individual, what it means to be human, and what it means to be a child. The film is so short and so casually presented that its hugeness sneaks up on the viewer. I’ve watched it twice and am ready to see it again.
I’m inarticulate this morning and can’t find my words. The film speaks beautifully for itself. Please watch it.
Magazines
Condé Nast shuts down four magazines:
Condé Nast will close Gourmet magazine, a magazine of almost biblical status in the food world, it was announced on Monday. Gourmet has been published since December 1940. Also being shut down are the Condé Nast magazines Cookie, Modern Bride and Elegant Bride, according to an internal company memo that also was sent to reporters Monday.
I asked this on twitter, but I don’t think anybody was taking me seriously: Who wants to create a one issue magazine?
Heightened Anxiety
In the unlikely event my reference to the School of Chick Publications doesn’t ring a bell, here is the classic THIS WAS YOUR LIFE!
Publishing and Digital Culture
For those who missed it, I did a series this week at Lone Gunman on what I have seen happening in publishing and digital culture:
- There is something outside of the text.
- Social Publishing
- Books, Printing, and Self-Publishing
- “We have broken your business, now we want your machines.”
- Newspaper
- Odds and Ends
- New Authors and the Web
- Publishing and the Digital Landscape
The Lone Gunman
I will be guest posting this week over at the Lone Gunman, while Lloyd is wandering the globe. I plan on doing a series on digital culture and publishing over the next few days.
The first of the series: There is something outside of the text.
Publishers, please get a clue.
My friend, Dave Gray, reflects on his hilariously depressing interaction with Penguin Publishing:
Recently I was contacted by an Art Director at Penguin Publishing. They are publishing a book about Twitter and wanted to use one of my sketches on the cover. They found it by doing a search on Flickr. Fantastic! The social web works!
The cover was beautifully designed and the sketch looked great. They didn’t have much money but that was fine with me. An email exchange ensued:
“Just credit my web address, davegray.info and that’ll be fine,” I wrote.
“Sorry, it’s policy not to print the web address,” she replied.
I insisted and she replied that the web policy on this was solid.
“Given that it’s a twitter book, what about my twitter address?” I asked. “It’s really simple, @davegray. Very little ink required, and I have thousands of people following me on twitter; I could help you promote the book.”
She declined and so did I. Funny how that works, isn’t it? I can’t see how having my twitter name on their book could possibly hurt anything. But publishers are often stupid that way. It’s the dogma of an industry.
Catalogue of an Exhibition
Catalogue of an Exhibition is a new collaborative (un)book by Derrick Mosley and Dave Gray. The publication announcement was as follows:
Cowbird Books is pleased to announce the publication of Catalogue of an Exhibition: Selected Works of the American Painter G, by Mark Osrick Graveley, D.E.D.
A photographic facsimile of the incomplete catalog from the seminal 1983 Woodstock Galleries retrospective of the painter G. As the original catalogs are quite rare, this edition offers to reproduce the crucial text in American art criticism for decades of graduate students at Columbia, who, by tradition, read it after having ingested mushroom caps.
M.O. Graveley is a noted art historian, lexicographer and philosopher. She grew up in Brooklyn sometime in the nineteen-fifties and graduated from Yale in the class of 1963. She is blind, and specializes in delivering customized epistemological experiences tailored to the discerning collector. Beyond that, little is known. Preview and buy it here.
The unbook was created by crafting a fictional story around a fictional exhibition around Dave Gray’s art. The authors encourage people to riff off the idea and contribute/edit/rehash/remix the content and the next edition of the unbook will include the best material from the pool of ideas under the same pseudonym. Think layer tennis for literature.
If you are wondering what the heck an unbook is, this is a good place to start.
The town without news
Death of local news articles are a dime a dozen, but I honestly think this is the first time I have seen this observation:
Claire Enders of Enders Analysis notes that the people who most need information about local goings-on are the immobile old and the poor, for whom the news that a local clinic is about to close can be vital. They are the people least likely to have access to broadband. As newspapers close, people will seek local news on television and radio, much of it supplied by the BBC. It will not be nearly as detailed.
Have I been reading the wrong pieces, or has that dicussion been neglected?
SXSW Panel: The Rise of the Unbook
The SXSW Panel Picker is up and one of the panels Deron and I are involved with made the first round cut, The Rise of the Unbook. The concept is pretty straightforward:
Driven by new technologies and ideas, the world of publishing is transforming. A new form is emerging; an ever-evolving, never-finished book, typically characterized by a curator, community and focused topic area: The unbook. We’ll discuss this new medium and its implications.
The Panel:
Ben Vershbow (New York Public Library)
Dave Gray (Co-Founder of the unbook movement, Founder of XPLANE, author of Marks and Meaning)
Russell Davies (Author, Wired columnist)
Andrew Simone (Clusterflock, design researcher)
Deron Bauman (Founder, Clusterflock, author, documentary film-maker)
Christian Crumlish (Curator of Yahoo Pattern Library, unbook author)
If this looks interesting to you, then we would appreciate a thumbs up. You can register here to vote.
UPDATE: An interesting and unintentional companion panel worth eyeballing is Snarkmarket’s Kindle 2020 (see a detailed explanation here).
B-side cover (ala Ohle)
To see the “A side” and other images and videos inspired by and for David Ohle’s forthcoming pair of novellas, Boons & The Camp, go here.
Amazon remotely deletes books from Kindles
This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.
The payoff is finding out who the author and the books in question are. I don’t want to spoil it.
How industries fail
Perhaps the most fascinating bit of Michael Nielsen’s article “Is Scientific Publishing About to Be Disrupted?” is a wish list of science-oriented Web services. It’s bracketed, however, by one of the better discussions I’ve seen of how the Internet has changed the media system and why so many otherwise intelligent people are still singing LA LA LA, I CAN’T HEAR YOU:
There are two common explanations for the disruption of industries like minicomputers, music, and newspapers. The first explanation is essentially that the people in charge of the failing industries are stupid. How else could it be, the argument goes, that those enormous companies, with all that money and expertise, failed to see that services like iTunes and Last.fm are the wave of the future? Why did they not pre-empt those services by creating similar products of their own? Polite critics phrase their explanations less bluntly, but nonetheless many explanations boil down to a presumption of stupidity. The second common explanation for the failure of an entire industry is that the people in charge are malevolent. In that explanation, evil record company and newspaper executives have been screwing over their customers for years, simply to preserve a status quo that they personally find comfortable.
It’s true that stupidity and malevolence do sometimes play a role in the disruption of industries. But in the first part of this essay I’ll argue that even smart and good organizations can fail in the face of disruptive change, and that there are common underlying structural reasons why that’s the case. That’s a much scarier story. If you think the newspapers and record companies are stupid or malevolent, then you can reassure yourself that provided you’re smart and good, you don’t have anything to worry about. But if disruption can destroy even the smart and the good, then it can destroy anybody.
(Via Richard Nash and some other people)
