“Belongs in the home of anyone who is serious about investigating this boundlessly fertile art form.” - The Guardian
10 reasons to love Copenhagen - travel tips and articles - Lonely Planet -
A new word to add to my vocabulary (and a new place to visit):
7. Hygge: the Danish way Falling somewhere between cosy, friendly and chilled out, hygge is a word that’s difficult to translate. The best way to get your head around hygge is to see it in action. Copenhagen’s harbour district, Nyhavn, makes an ideal place to start. On sunny days, Copenhageners can be seen sprawling along the waterfront, sharing snacks at one of the bistros on the cobbled quayside. As dusk falls, they huddle together under patio heaters to escape the chill evening air, or duck into basement bars, with quintessentially hygge combinations of low ceilings, tightly-packed tables and crackling fires.
The Millions : The Arcades Project: Martin Amis’ Guide to Classic Video Games -
Journalist finds an early work of Martin Amis, long out of print and disavowed by the author, which is all about video games:
Invasion of the Space Invaders, then, is the madwoman in the attic of Amis’ house of nonfiction; many have heard rumors of its shameful presence, but few have seen it with their own eyes. I recently discovered a copy in the library of the university where I work, and I don’t think the librarian knew quite what to make of my obvious excitement at this coup. (“Wow,” I said, giving a low, respectful whistle as she handed it across the counter. “Would you look at that?”) It’s a deeply strange artifact: an A4-sized, full color glossy affair, abundantly illustrated with captioned photographs, screen shots, and lavish illustrations of exploding space ships and lunar landscapes. It boasts a perfunctory introduction by Steven Spielberg (“read this book and learn from young Martin’s horrific odyssey round the world’s arcades before you too become a video-junkie”), complete with full-page portrait of the Hollywood Boy Wonder leaning awkwardly against an arcade machine like some sort of geeky, high-waisted Fonz. We’re not even into the text proper, and already its cup runneth over with 100-proof WTF.
Just imagine, if Mart’s literary career hadn’t worked out, he’d have been a slam dunk for a games journalist. Then again, perhaps the ranks of game journalism are already overstuffed with failed Martin Amises.
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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.