Thursday Things

Hello, readers. It's been a while. A few things have happened. There's a new president, for one. People seem to think he'll be great, or possibly fail, but most hope he succeeds. Except for this guy. Also, it's possible that life, the universe, and everything, including you, reader, is just one big hologram.

Three other things, then, from our holographic universe:

Thing 1) Haruki Murakami wins the Jerusalem award, which is given to those authors, like Arthur Miller or Simone de Beauvoir, whose work deals with "human freedom, society, politics, and government."

Thing 2) The Louvre opens an exhibition of original plates by comic book artists, which makes sense considering the French love of Tin Tin and Asterix and other les bandes dessinees. "Just like comics are not only fun or for entertainment," curator Fabrice Douar says, "the Louvre equally is not dusty and boring." [via Rhea Cote Robbins, photo AP/Thimault Camus]

Thing 3) TIME talks the evolution of publishing, relating our current time of economic and technological transformation to the fluxy turn of the 18th century when new fangled things like capitalism and printing technology brought about the "novel" as we know it today. Things like fan-fiction, wikipedia, and YouTube, according to TIME, have lessened the freakiness of self-publishing and pushed copyright to its limits, and may lead to a form of fiction "ravenously referential and intertextual." The article ultimately posits a future dichotomy between Old Publishing ( "stately, quality controled, and relatively expensive" ) versus a New Publishing ("cheap, promiscuous and unconstrained by paper, money, or institutional taste"). [photo Getty/Chris Jackson]

Happy Thursday, readers.

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Monday Links, or This Is Where We Live

Hello, readers. Here are things you can read about on the internet.

Annie Leibowitz lists the 15 photography books that most influenced her.

Maud Newton also lists things, in this case her favorite readings of the past year. She hopes you'll buy them as a means of bailing out troubled bookstores.

Speaking of trouble, the publishing industry is having problems with not firing people, serious problems.

NPR has a small bit on some of the best volumes of collected correspondence written by literary types. Some of these correspondences are actual, such as Words in Air, the letters of Elizabeth Bishop and Robert Lowell, and some are not, such as Dear American Airlines, which is a work of fiction written in the epistolary style.

The Lady's Murder is a sexy, cool graphic short story written and illustrated by Eliza Frye. It reminded me, for some odd reason, of Aeon Flux. It is perhaps NSFW, being as there's some silhouetted murder and occasional nudity. You can read it at Narrative Magazine, though, if you sign up for a free account and are okay with that sort of thing.

Christopher Barzak has a new book with fox maidens and suicides clubs. It's called The Love We Share Without Knowing. Here's a review.

Ever wondered what a city made out of book covers would look like? Wonder no more. Fourth Estate, an imprint of HarperCollins, has produced this stop-motion walk through a town of Corrections, Diving Bells, and Butterflies. It's slightly whimsical, a touch sublime, and wholly awesome.

Also, Mr. T has a comic book.


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