Condalmo

Then again it will be.

Excuse me for a moment, small sidetrack here.

How great is that?

A public font.

If I had any free scratch at all, I'd be all over this like Helvetica on ...everything:

A Public Space was pleased to present the New York City cinema run of the acclaimed documentary film Helvetica a few months back. Now we've got a special gift for you: subscribe to APS, renew your subscription, or give a gift subscription, and you'll receive a free copy of the new DVD of Helvetica! (That's a $25 value, friends.) Special thanks to Plexifilm for donating the DVDs.

This eye-opening film about typography, graphic design and global visual culture will make a great gift. Get one for yourself, and then starting checking off that shopping list...

This offer is for USA and Canadian subscriptions only. There are only a limited number of free Helvetica DVDs available, so subscribe now. When buying gift subscriptions, be sure to change the shipping address before finalizing the order. Feel free to email us at subscribe (at) apublicspace.org with any questions.

Friends, I value that film higher than $25, but market forces are not under my jurisdiction. 

 

Expiration date.

I know, I know: blogging about blogging about blogging.  Still:

I have set an end-date on my blog: one year after its first post, thus ending on August 27, 2008. This logic flies in the face of blog analysts who note that most blogs do not last more than a year, as if that mattered. I do not think the end-date has to be iron-clad. It is just a target. Why do I think an end-date is important for a blog? How does it contribute to slow blogging?

• It gives your blog focus. You have one year to say what you have to say. You will be less likely to dawdle on about silly topics (like “blogging about blogging”; eek, that’s what I’m doing).
• You can let go of worries about building your readership or career based on your blog. Who cares about the size of your readership when you know you are going to politely bid farewell at the end of the year.
• Things without limits tend to be dangerous: cancer, GDP, greed. Good things have a natural end: fun days, stories, lives.
• You can shake off the baggage from your old blog when it ends, and start fresh with new ideas on your new blog.

Have you set an end-date for your blog?

Support Condalmo with your holiday shopping.

As others have noted, you can often support your favorite/appreciated/somewhat endearing in an erratic way websites by shopping through them for the holidays.  My site features a Powell's search box, through which you can buy books, DVD's, and so on.  Thanks, and have a good season.

I have no idea how easy it is running a green website.

Let's find out.  My button is down there on the right side.

America done reading.

Parents, take up your books, teach your children well.  The bad news:

Americans are reading less and their reading proficiency is declining at troubling rates, according to a report that the National Endowment for the Arts will issue today. The trend is particularly strong among older teens and young adults, and if it is not reversed, the NEA report suggests, it will have a profound negative effect on the nation's economic and civic future...

The story the numbers tell, Gioia said, can be summed up in about four sentences:

"We are doing a better job of teaching kids to read in elementary school. But once they enter adolescence, they fall victim to a general culture which does not encourage or reinforce reading. Because these people then read less, they read less well. Because they read less well, they do more poorly in school, in the job market and in civic life."...

"This is not a study about literary reading," Gioia said. It's a study about reading of any sort and "what the consequences of doing it well or doing it badly are." In an increasingly competitive world, the consequences of doing it badly include "economic decline."...

"What we're trying to do is say: These are the facts. This is a framework to understand the issues. Let's talk about it," Gioia said. And the key question is: What are the consequences if America becomes "a nation in which reading is a minority activity?"

Consequences?  None!  We're America!   

"Promise Breaker."

Chris Adrian's new story in Esquire.  The man leaps tall buildings.  I will not tell you anything about this story, except that You should go read this story, as should Stephen King, and anyone else that says the form is dying.

Gob's Grief just got moved up on the list.  (Also: yes, read this, already!)

(Thanks to Maud for pointing it out.)

I will not finish this post before one or more children need me.

Nevertheless.  Finished reading Men in Space while on break last night.

---
Seven hours later.  (Don't try this at home!)  Yeah - Tom McCarthy.  Am I as impressed as I was with Remainder?  Hmmm.  Well, let's be clear: McCarthy states himself, in an afterward, that this book

started as a series of disjointed, semi-autobiographical sketches written in what seems like another era, and grew into one long, disjointed document from which a plot of sorts emerged from time to time to sniff the air before going to ground again.

That's about right.  Remainder was a sword - all of one piece, focused, about something; this one's more like a centrifuge, with a number of things tossed in - art forgery, the mafia, the end of Russia and the beginning of the European Union, expat life, a police officer in mental collapse, among other elements - and left to mix themselves up before McCarthy turns the speed up to eleven and it all gets spun out in different directions by the end.  (And a couple of those items get smushed up sort of unpleasantly by the G-force.  Meaning, I was less than satisfied with the smush, but should expect no less from a centrifuge.)  Don't go into it expecting anything like Remainder (though he continues to have a very precise eye for details - like the narrator of Remainder, everything is exactly described and set out) and you'll likely find this book very satisfying, as it's very well written - one particular sequence, a questioning in police custody, is described so perfectly, it's just right. 

It's really a fantastic book; I'm just in a mindset lately of preferring swords to centrifuges. 

Wonderful.

Every year, around this time.

In the middle with you.

As reported at TEV, Sheila Heti - author of the fine Ticknor - has put the entirety of her short story collection, The Middle Stories, online.

Street savvy.

Stephany Aulenback takes you down the street that has a name.  Child-friendly excerpt:

In a funny article for The New York Times Magazine, Virginia Heffernan explains why the earliest Sesame Street television episodes are unsuitable for toddlers today according, apparently, to the current executive producer of the show, Carol-Lynn Parente. Heffernan mentions the following warning (written on the DVD case and repeated by a cartoon character at the beginning of the first DVD itself): "These early 'Sesame Street' episodes are intended for grown-ups, and may not suit the needs of today’s preschool child."

I was taken aback by that warning, too, until we actually sat down and watched the shows. Luke found them incredibly boring. Tongue in cheek, Heffernan explains first that the subject matter is too gritty, that it promotes bad habits and bad behaviours, and then that it's too pastoral. The piece is written in such a way as to indicate that, while Heffernan herself believes otherwise, the current producer of Sesame Street actually does believe the early shows were rife with unsuitable  material. But Carol-Lynn Parente is quoted verbatim only twice. It'd be interesting to read a proper, serious interview with her on this question.

I would almost say that today's Sesame Street is more unsuitable.  Too damn hyper, loud, obnoxious, all the focus on Elmo, none of the wonder, give me Mister Rogers' Neighborhood any day of the week... and get off my lawn, you kids today!

By its cover for 2007.

Some of the best covers of the year.  I'm fond of the Remainder cover, which should surprise nobody.  From the link, though, I think my favorite is the following.

Follow the link to see a lot of other desirables. 

I know there would be a market for it, if publishers set up a CafePress-type site where you could make shirts out of covers from books.  A small market, but with a made-to-order website, it couldn't hurt.

Interviews, oh my.

Treats all over the place today: David Mitchell in the Guardian:

When you were growing up did you have books in your home?
Yes. Now I have a home somewhere in my books.

Marry me!  And then, we get an interview with The Guy Behind NYRB Classics:

"Interesting readers read around," he told me, "and a series like this needs to cater to them and bring in different kinds of readers."

And since he's in charge, the catalog caters to Frank's taste in Russian and Italian literature and what he calls British literature of the bizarre.

"They are passions," he said, "but also kinds of literary accomplishments that I think have been underestimated or sidelined in American critical estimation. There are books I call great accidents, writers whose opus doesn't put them among the greats, but that particular book is like nothing else and well worth reading."

Finally got my hands on Maqroll, though BookMooch.  And I'm hoping someone will get Varieties of Exile on there soon.

Paper Cuts is compiling a list of decent audiobooks:

The best-ever book on tape, I’ve claimed in print, is Amanda Plummer’s reading of Joyce Carol Oates’s “Black Water,” a slim 1992 novel based loosely on Chappaquiddick. In Plummer’s telling, the story is pointillistic, onrushing and spooky; it casts the kind of spell that lets 300 miles roll under your wheels before you’ve had the chance to notice your coffee’s gone cold.

I’ve got a long drive to make on Wednesday night, Thanksgiving Eve – deep into the Appalachians with my family. Maybe you’ve got a similar trip to undertake. Which makes this seem like a good time to ask: What are your favorite audio books? Got any recommendations? I really need some new ones.

Stop by and help a guy out.  I'm cold on the Cloud Atlas audiobook at the moment; the reading of the first Louisa Ray part is horrid, and that was my least favorite section of the book when I read it.  I'm looking for short story collections, myself.

The movie before the book.

(t-shirt, from.)

In the future, everyone is rich.

T'dah:

Amazon Kindle: the future of reading?  Not likely, not at $400 a pop.  This article can be summarized:  "This new revolutionary device does not have (insert desirable feature here), but Bezos expects that future versions will."  While Amazon sells you a BetaMax, someone (Apple, probably) is making the VCR. 

National Book Awards: glad I didn't bet.

Denis Johnson has taken the National Book Award prize for Tree of Smoke.   

The badly-behaved primer.

Hard to get the subject right for this post; so many possibilities, most of them from that dark, Milwaukee's Best-stained corner of my brain, neglected for the most part since undergraduate school.  Is that tardtarded? 

Retard, on the other hand, has become just tard in a process known as aphaeresis, meaning that the beginning of the word has been removed. A tard is the same as a retard. 

It has also become the multi-use suffix -tard(ed), extracting almost whole the root that originally meant “slow” in Latin, which now carries with it the meaning of “stupid”. It’s what we call a formative – a tiny piece of language that contains meaning but isn’t a word on its own. 

Motarded, for example, is used among American military personnel to describe a person who is “excessively enthusiastic about being a soldier to the point of stupidity”. It probably comes from the mo- in moronic, motivated, or more plus retarded.   

A new recruit who is motarded is very gung-ho: eager to fight, eager to shoot weapons, and eager to out-soldier everybody else. 

Smacktard is another -tard word and yet another name for a stupid person, perhaps one who is acting as if they are intoxicated by smack, the drug heroin. Some people use it in a way that suggests that a smacktard is a person who is behaving so stupidly that you want to smack them across the mouth.

I do love the linguistics, though, through and through.  My favorite undergraduate course, far and away.  Here's your linguistics money quote, courtesy Russ Rymer:

Linguistics is arguably the most hotly contested property in the academic realm. It is soaked with the blood of poets, theologians, philosophers, philologists, psychologists, biologists, anthropologists, and neurologists, along with whatever blood can be got out of grammarians.

And you thought linguistics stodgy?  There's blood on my hands!

Walker Percy and the non-novel.

The psychiatrist here at the day job, knowing I have two more days here, thoughtfully gave me a parting gift of this rare nonfiction from Walker Percy - "The State of the Novel - Dying Art or New Science?" - I haven't had time today to read it all the way through, but here's the lead:

The novel is regularly said to be dying - and now it is said with perhaps more justification than at any other time.  In fact it is difficult now even to speak of the novel as a generic art form.  If one uses as a criterion the familiar features of the traditional novel - plot, scene, characterization, actions, denouement, development of character and so on - it is hard to find a worthy example of the ancient art.  Anything can and does pass for a novel now.  A novel is what you call something that won't sell if you call it poems or short stories.  Autobiography is novel.  History is novel.  Sociology is novel.  Tirade is novel.  I am not complaining.  For the undeniable fact is that non-novels which pass as novels now are usually better than novels which look like novels.

The War on The War on.

Do I post or do I clam up?  Do I post or do I clam up?  If I post, there will be trouble; if I don't, it will be double.  Yes, it's that time of year - when retailers thrust their Christmas-jingle sale notices down your throat two months early, sucking the life from the holiday, no one noticing or caring that, essentially, there really is a Grinch, and he's sure you want to start shopping now - and meanwhile let's just hold hands and pretend everything's cool, instead of embracing the idea that learning from past mistakes could be positive and we could still enjoy our turkey, or Tofurki, or what have you.  (Link not safe for mealtime reading.)  I wasn't going to say anything - you know, let the kids have their tantrum and ignore it to extinguish the behavior - but, honestly, a lot of ignoring vis-à-vis Native Americans has already happened, not to their benefit.

Paper journals fold.

Pindeldyboz and Small Spiral Notebook are ceasing publication of the print versions. 

National Book Awards predictionating.

I was going to try and whip up some frothy concoction here, but Callie says it best.

Fiction
Despite the rumor-mill & regardless of the word on the street that Jim Shepard may well take the cake on this one, I am oddly torn between Joshua Ferris & Lydia Davis. I know, two entirely different books. Entirely. Yet I loved them both for equally different reasons.  I also just love the idea of a first-time novelist winning the award. I dig Joshua Ferris as well, whip-smart and funny. Terribly talented. But then winning such an award so early in his career might wreck him, right? And no one wants that. So, who seems more able to withstand wrecking? Davis. For all those who cry "where's the heft" or "but it's almost like a book of poetry", suck it.

I've also seen some Denis Johnson mentioned; would that be a sort of anti-war statement, to pick that one for the prize?

Various roundup-related things.

• Have you seen the new Paris Review?  Now you have.  I wonder about the general reaction of subscribers to this cover.  Please note the inclusion of fiction by J. Robert "LongPen" Lennon; excerpt is here.
• I've been following comments on the news that Borders plans to put flatscreen televisions in their stores.  I'll withhold my thoughts on it for now, but the trend of responses seem to point to Borders looking like a bunch of chumps.  A lot of "I'll never shop there again" talk.  Depending on how my part time/full time job search goes, I may be able to do some on-site reporting.  Will you forsake me if I take employment at the megabookstore, dear reader?
• Or, I may seek out some work-themed (re) reading materials, depending on how that goes.  Chondalmoaski.  
• Meantime, this t-shirt would make me super-popular at the night job. 
• One more job note: my last week at the day job.  The night job has moved to ten hour shifts.  Just not manageable to do both.  The work isn't strenuous - typesetting on Quark, burning through AAA batteries with the mp3 player (just finished the Pacific journal section of Cloud Atlas, and Kafka on the Shore is coming from the library - ), and reading Men in Space on my "lunch" breaks.  Thank you for your e-mails of concern/confusion; I intend to sleep all weekend and maybe get back to some more normal reading/posting next week.
• Remember when I couldn't stop talking about The Exquisite and The Open Curtain?  Is there anything better than sinking into a really excellent read?  (So far, the audio version of Cloud Atlas is very satisfactory, well-read - speaking of excellent reads.)  At any rate, Coffee House Press is doing a 30% off holiday sale when you purchase through their site.
• Fairy tales to you, wherever you may roam.  Modern ones.

One-day writing course.

You probably already know about this, but Joshua Henkin (Matrimony) just became the most prolific book-blogger in history.  Okay, that's not verified, but he certainly put in a hard day's work guest blogging at Mark's house.  Joshua's site is here.

Pajamas, baby. Pajamas.

I love this; I really do:

What Happens at Blog World Stays at Blog World

Viva Las Bloggers!

Bloggers and blog readers are gathering today for the first annual Blog World Expo in Las Vegas. In addition to the non-stop panels, a “Pajama Party” will be held Thursday night at the Hard Rock Hotel.

New media!!  See if you can spot Ed Champion in the above photo.  (Hint: green.)  The photo caption is not my idea, but the photo/caption might make a good logo.  The article continues:

Visitors to the booth get a free Pajamas Media sleep mask.

Sleep?

I note with interest and befuddlement (I just now stumbled across this whole Pajamas Media thing, don't laugh, the First Life's been sort of hectic lately) that when I point at that "visitors" link on the PM page, a LingoSpot bubble opens (is inflated?), and tells me that articles related to aforementioned "visitors" apparently include:

• Our Degenerating Media [ Part 1 ]

  10/18/2007

• To kill or not to kill

  09/14/2007

• Confessions of a Perpetual Adolescent

  10/23/2007

Words escape me.  Off to bed, oh glorious night off, sans 21st-century new-media-branded sleep aid.

Loves his hardcover.

British man wrings hands, plays prestige/anti-elitist cards to say "Wait" to Picador.  Running down his points - see if you can follow his thinking, with my thoughts in parentheses: 

• People don't want to pay for hardcovers.  (Case closed!)
• Paperbacks are beginning to get better coverage on review pages.  (What review pages?  Okay, maybe this is true; I can't say one way or the other, but again, case closed, right?)
• Picador should be wary of offending authors who feel that the hardcover adds prestige.  (Other than Sour Grapes Ian McEwan, who thinks this?)
• Then:
  • If they dispense with hardbacks, they will have to put out larger print runs of paperbacks to justify publication; and they will find that the market is often resistant to new fiction, at any price.

    As a result, they will only take on authors whom they believe can sell the paperback print runs - a surefire recipe for conservative commissioning. The gap between the McEwans and the rest will grow. A policy that appears at first glance to be anti-elitist may turn out to have just the opposite effect.

Eh, this seems kind of shaky.  That's why we have independent presses.  And it's not like the next McEwan novel won't be reviewed by every blog, newspaper, and magazine in the land.  And it's not like publishers - the ones Clee seems to have in mind here - are exactly taking a gamble with most of the books they publish, hardcover or not. 

Nicholas Clee, were I a baker, you would not be the recipient of a baked good for your strangely counterintuitive arguments.

More like it.

As declaration, and as request:

Picador has unveiled plans to launch its new fiction in dual hardback and paperback editions, in a bid to combat the ailing market for hardback literary fiction. The move raises serious questions about the future of the hardback literary novel, which Picador publisher Andrew Kidd described as a "moribund format".

From spring 2008, "the majority" of new titles from the literary imprint of Pan Macmillan will be released in limited, high-end hardback editions and B-format paperback editions simultaneously.

Picador's initiative follows falling sales for literary hardbacks, and a disappointing response to efforts by all publishers to attract more buyers by changing the timing, pricing or presentation of the hardback launch.

Here's hoping this is a news story that gets mileage across the land and that more publishers follow.

Riches in your ears.

I continue to get most of my RDA of fiction from audio.  The most recent installment of PRI's Selected Shorts was a good one, with stories being read including Ernest Hemingway's "A Clean, Well-Lighted Place," and his "After the Storm," as well as Haruki Murakami's "The Little Green Monster." 

The New Yorker has a new story available as well (why only once a month?) - this time around, a reading of Mavis Gallant's "When We Were Nearly Young."  You can find it at their site, maybe - as of this writing,  it's a dead link, to the Gallant piece, but maybe the weird basement guy in charge of podcast maintenance will notice by the time you read this post, and fix it.

Blazer rending, revisited.

Haven't you heard, it's the apocalypse:

These days advertising is an inescapable fact of life, a shadow that follows you everywhere, staring down at you on the Tube or jumping out at you on the internet. Soon, it could be following you into your local library and popping out of its titles, after a number of councils agreed to a pilot scheme where thousands of adverts will be inserted in books.

By the middle of next year, libraries in places such as Leeds, Dorset, Somerset, Essex and Bromley, will receive around three million advertising inserts per month. This means that every time you borrow a book from your library, you will also get an insert.

What will this mean for our libraries? Well, apparently they will receive lots of extra revenue from it, which they undoubtedly need. But librarians themselves are less lucky: they will have their work cut out as they have to put the thousands of inserts inside the books by hand.

... which, in turn, will lead to a dramatic increase in paper cuts, which will no doubt be a boon to sterile bandage manufacturers, who no doubt are the shadowy evildoers behind the curtain, orchestrating the advertising in the first place.

I don't know; I mean, is anyone surprised?  Of course it's disgusting, the ads leering from the back of the book - and worse is the slippery slope:

The real worry is that these inserts are just the thin end of the wedge. Imagine the horror of reading a book that is interrupted every 10 or 20 pages by a series of adverts. While such a dystopia seems unlikely for the time being, the idea of adverts in books should fill readers with unease.

Yes, well, it actually fills my head with ache, but we're protesting the snow when there's an avalanche coming.    What are the options here?  Boycott the library?  TiVo for books?  We need more than a shovel here.  We don't live in a world where the majority of people care enough about the obtrusiveness of advertising to do anything about it.  Nor do we live in a world that cares enough about strong libraries to make such a desperate attempt to raise money unnecessary.  Unless a Consortium of Heavyweight Authors (now there's your graphic novel idea, right there!) comes together to protest, I don't see the advertising juggernaut even being slowed down.

Post Office.

A co-worker just commented that, were he in my 80 hour/week shoes, he would go postal.  (He actually said it that way - "your eighty hour per week shoes."  Who talks that way?)  Wouldn't you know that I had just read this:

In this recurring series, starting today, we hope to explore some of the underlying concepts and philosophies behind the advent of our federal postal system, describe some of the more interesting stories and personalities behind this development, as well highlight some of the illuminating and fun historical facts that comprise this organization's history, and in turn, hopefully be able to begin to contextualize the practice of letter writing within American history. Some topics that we'll be tackling include: the influence of the postal service on the development of the roads and transportation systems that we use today, the relationship of the U.S.P.S. to Colonial American history, evolution of the prepaid postage system, the Pony Express, the function of mail in democratic discourse, the ways that technology has changed how we send and receive mail, how exactly a letter travels all that way, mailboxes through the ages, the recent effects of rate hikes on independent media, and of course, as many curious and bizarre stories about postmasters as we can find.

Incidentally, Post Office is the best Bukowski book.  Having been an English major, I would know.

Orders already coming in from the Oval Office.

Experimental Xerox Paper Erases Itself,  Results In Temporary Documents On Reusable Paper

Xerox Corporation scientists have invented a way to make prints whose images last only a day, so that the paper can be used again and again. The technology, which is still in a preliminary state, blurs the line between paper documents and digital displays and could ultimately lead to a significant reduction in paper use.

You know - because they're environmentalists.