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Unreal Estate: Artist Tim Doyle Re-Imagines Pop Culture Locales.
(via laughingsquid)
Culture Desk: Seven Decades of Desert Island Discs : The New Yorker -
The New Yorker reviews the Desert Island Discs retrospective which was broadcast yesterday (and resists the temptation to use the US spelling of the word “Disks”):
If some castaways couldn’t resist the temptation to be clever—Alfred Hitchcock’s luxury item was a Continental railway timetable—and others surrendered to predictability (Philip Larkin chose a typewriter), a few gave their choices more soulful thought. Paul McCartney, who was the castaway thirty years ago, on the fortieth anniversary of the show, eschewed any Beatles hits, but included a track by John Lennon, from “Double Fantasy”—“Beautiful Boy.” Yoko Ono chose Gracie Fields’s sentimental favorite “When I Grow Too Old to Dream,” because she had sung it with her aged mother. Daniel Barenboim, the conductor, who was married to the cellist Jacqueline du Pré, spoke of their discovery that she suffered from multiple sclerorsis. She had to stop playing when she could no longer feel her bow, and he chose one of the pieces she had loved most, Elgar’s Cello Concerto. Ronald Searle, the cartoonist, who died last month, at ninety-one, spent much of the Second World War as a prisoner of the Japanese in the Kwai jungle. He wanted to be cast away with the four last songs of Richard Strauss, he said, because they give you the courage to face death.
If you’d like to hear these snippets for yourself, the BBC is in the process of putting up a massive archive on the official site, with individual episodes available as podcasts. Yay for the TV Licence.
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Paris Review - The Art of Fiction No. 211, William Gibson -
Wonderful interview with William Gibson (Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition), not least of which is this tidbit on how he approaches the craft of writing:
INTERVIEWER
How do you begin a novel?
GIBSON
I have to write an opening sentence. I think with one exception I’ve never changed an opening sentence after a book was completed.
INTERVIEWER
You won’t have planned beyond that one sentence?
GIBSON
No. I don’t begin a novel with a shopping list—the novel becomes my shopping list as I write it. It’s like that joke about the violin maker who was asked how he made a violin and answered that he started with a piece of wood and removed everything that wasn’t a violin. That’s what I do when I’m writing a novel, except somehow I’m simultaneously generating the wood as I’m carving it.
E. M. Forster’s idea has always stuck with me—that a writer who’s fully in control of the characters hasn’t even started to do the work. I’ve never had any direct fictional input, that I know of, from dreams, but when I’m working optimally I’m in the equivalent of an ongoing lucid dream. That gives me my story, but it also leaves me devoid of much theoretical or philosophical rationale for why the story winds up as it does on the page. The sort of narratives I don’t trust, as a reader, smell of homework.
There’s no three act structure, or noticeboards with post-it notes mapping out the course of the story. Merely the first sentence.
They don’t teach that in creative writing classes. If they did, the course wouldn’t last much longer than an hour.
In ‘Game of Thrones,’ a Language to Make the World Feel Real - NYTimes.com -
People have made a career out of this?
“There’s been a sea change in Hollywood. They realize there’s a fan base out there that wants constructed languages,” said Matt Pearson, a linguistics professor at Reed College in Portland, Ore. He created Thhtmaa (pronounced tukhh-t’-mah), the language of termite-like aliens in the short-lived NBC series “Dark Skies.”
“Game of Thrones,” based on the best-selling series of novels “A Song of Ice and Fire” by George R. R. Martin, may be the biggest television showcase for an invented language. The books, which primarily follow feuding kingdoms in the fictional land of Westeros, had a scattering of Dothraki words, but the show’s executive producers wanted a fully formed language.
I remember from my school days, there was a kid who was learning to speak Klingon. Predictably, he came in for a lot of mockery. He’s probably consulting on one of these TV shows by now.
Opening image from Asterios Polyp. “Striking”, eh?
Book Review - 'Asterios Polyp,' Written and Illustrated by David Mazzucchelli - Review - NYTimes.com -
Today I read this in a bookshop, curled up in an armchair. Feeling guilty, might have to stump up some cash and actually pay for the thing:
Enter “Asterios Polyp”: a big, proud, ambitious chunk of a graphic novel, with modernism on its mind and a perfectly geometrical chip on its shoulder. The tension between formalist rigor and emotional subtlety is not just the theme (and method) of the cartoonist David Mazzucchelli’s decade-in-the-making opus; it’s basically the plot. The book is a satirical comedy of remarriage, a treatise on aesthetics and design and ontology, a late-life Künstlerroman, a Novel of Ideas with two capital letters, and just about the most schematic work of fiction this side of that other big book that constantly alludes to the “Odyssey.”
Asterios Polyp himself is adorably dislikable, an egocentric, condescending, irritable “paper architect” and academic who sees everything in terms of dualities. (“Anything that is not functional is merely decorative,” he declares.) When Polyp’s father came to America, we’re told, “an exasperated Ellis Island official had cut the family name in half.” That name would have to have been Polyphemus, as in the Cyclops. Asterios himself is a metaphorical cyclops, lacking the ability to perceive emotional depth. Even his head is drawn as a two-dimensional construct: half a perfect circle, interrupted by two equally proportioned curves.
The artwork was beautiful, and a world away from Mazzucchelli’s previous scribblings on Daredevil and Batman comics. There are sequences in it that don’t immediately make sense, and then a couple of hours later the meaning becomes clear, sneaking up on you like a pickpocket. I liked it very much.