“Nashvillians woke up one morning and found that we no longer had a bookstore”

…and Ann Patchett’s “secret was that [she] did not much miss those mall-size Gargantuas.” So she set out, more or less on impulse, to recreate the kind of bookstore experience that she did miss: a cozy space with carefully curated shelves and employees who double as a personal recommendation system. Partnered with Karen Hayes, a former Random House sales rep, Patchett set out to open Nashville’s newest independent bookstore, despite numerous warnings (and her own fears) that “the bookstore is dead.”

Her article in The Atlantic, recounting her experience of the precipitous process, is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Highlights: her eager gleaning of bookstore know-how during the signing tour that coincided with Parnassus Books’ incubation period; and the narrative she began to craft, with increasing conviction, during interviews: that the moment of the small independent bookstore is now.

And whether or not Parnassus’ success is replicable, it’s still vicariously thrilling to read about Patchett’s realization of her ability to accomplish every reader’s ultimate social joy: “I could talk strangers into reading books that I love.”

Go to:

Ann Patchett: bio and works reviewed
Bel Canto, by Ann Patchett (2001): review by Emera

“Chamber of Secrets: The Sorcery of Angela Carter”

Marina Warner writes with beautiful force and exuberance about Angela Carter’s fairy tales, sensuality, ethics of the erotic, and more, here in the Paris Review.

A particularly breathtaking passage, arising from a remark on the origin of one of the stories in The Bloody Chamber as a radio play:

‘Very few writers use the imperative as she does—conspiratorially. Carter wanted to practise the atavistic lure, the atavistic power, of voices in the dark. “The writer who gives the words to those voices,” she wrote, “retains some of the authority of the most antique tellers of tales.”

The voice isn’t on its own, ringing in a hollow space. Open any page and a full score rises from its word-notes, of winds howling, teardrops falling, diamond earrings tinkling, snapping teeth, sneezing, and wheezing. Storytelling for Angela Carter was an island full of noises and sweet airs, and like Caliban, who heard a thousand twangling instruments hum about his ears, she was tuned to an ethereal universe packed with sensations, to which she was alive with every organ. Acoustics are not the only means, however, that she draws on to convey the lucid dreams she creates in her action. Her imagination is spatial, an architect’s axonometric vision, as she moves us through palaces and castles, forests and tundras, dungeons and attics, tracking with us down pathways towards her various sealed depositories of secrets, those bloody chambers. What reader does not explore with her these passages and woodland tracks? Who does not feel the Beast’s dark carriage like a hearse rumbling towards his eerily uninhabited domain? And who does not sense, through her powerful evocations, the pricking of thorns, the jaw-cracking stringiness of granny, the jangling of bed springs, the licking of a big cat’s tongue, the soft luxurious furs and velvets and skin, and the piercing contrasts with ice, glass, metal?’

Warner’s essay is from the new Folio edition of The Bloody Chamber. (Folio’s gorgeously illustrated editions might be my new crack, by the way. I’m particularly hankering after the Jillian-Tamaki-illustrated Irish Myths and Legends.)

– E

The worst sentence I have seen

– in recent memory, courtesy who else but H. P. Lovecraft:

“And yet, as I have said, vague new fears hovered menacingly over us; as if giant bat-winged gryphons looked on transcosmic gulfs.”

from “The Lurking Fear”

 

Don’t you just HATE it when those giant bat-winged gryphons look on your transcosmic gulfs?

(Also, the semi-colon is [sic]. Lovecraft abuses them as if he were being paid by the punctuation error rather than the word.)

I’m reading a fat paperback collection of Lovecraft right now, to get in the Halloween spirit, and thinking of making a drinking game. Drink for every “demoniac,” every “unutterable,” every “hideousness,” every “unutterable cacodaemoniacal hideousness”…

– E

“Recovering Lolita”

Recovering Lolita (via design blog Imprint) is one of the most visually/literarily fascinating and provoking posts I’ve seen this year.

Several years ago, blogger John Bertram held a contest inviting designers to create new covers for Lolita, citing a history of coy misrepresentation of Nabokov’s novel. In Bertram’s words, “We are talking about a novel which has child rape at its core.” Yet as Imprint points out, “[Lolita is] chronically miscast as a teenage sexpot—just witness the dozens of soft-core covers over the years.”

Bertram was not that much more satisfied with the results of the competition, and invited 60 new designers (most of them women) to contribute images, accompanied by essays by both designers and Nabokov scholars, for a book entitled Lolita: Story of a Cover Girl. The book will come out next spring; in the blog post you can check out a number of the images submitted to the contest, as well as a brief interview with Bertram, in which he touches on the ethical considerations that accompany creating a cover for Lolita (or even simply enjoying it as a novel), and the way that book covers can, indeed, change our perception of a book and its meaning.

Some of the images in the post are visually pleasing but entirely noncommittal from a thematic standpoint (e.g. Kelly Blair’s); I think the best combine cool wit with a deep sense of the ominous and invasive, i.e. Jamie Keenan’s:

 

– E

Aspirational reading

From Carl Sagan’s notes as an undergraduate: have a look at his list of planned “Outside Readings” for the “Autumn Quarter, 1954.” It’s an impressive sampling of scientific and Western thought; there’s Hubble, Oppenheimer, the Bible, André Gide – and also, of course, a science fiction anthology from Ballantine’s Star line. If I’m looking at the right one, it included short novels by Theodore Sturgeon, Lester Del Rey, and Jessamyn West.

– E

A dispatch from SDCC

What Neil Gaiman has been working on for the past 18 months.

If you’d like to cut to the chase: it’s a Sandman prequel, with art by DC artist JH Williams, explaining from what travails Morpheus was returning when he was captured by Roderick Burgess at the very beginning of the series. “This has been an incredibly long time coming. It was one of the few stories that actually felt, when I finished Sandman, like I had failed because I had not told this story.”

See Williams’ first piece of promotional art – which I quite enjoy, it’s a weird slick space-agey Art Deco-ish Klimt-y portrait of Dream – for the comic here! I have mixed feelings about prequels generally (when I saw that there were Watchmen prequels coming out, I… … …), but they’re shaded positive here since this is a story that’s always been a part of the Sandman universe; it just hadn’t yet been shared.

– E

 

Go to:

Neil Gaiman: bio and works reviewed

“Vikings will work for plunder. Geeks and artists will work for a dream. But businesspeople require… other forms of motivation.”

SF icon Neal Stephenson wishes video games with swords were more fun. And why the hell shouldn’t we help him out with that?

See: Neal Stephenson’s Kickstarter for CLANG (a.k.a. “Guitar Hero with swords”).

Basically: “Hi, I’m Neal Stephenson. I like hitting other people with sharp objects. I am dissatisfied with representation of this activity in existing virtual entertainment for nerds. I would like to make better virtual representation of this activity.” [N.B. I’m a gamer. No actual nerd-hate contained in this post; that would be silly.]

Even if you’re not inclined to contribute, make sure to watch the accompanying videos, which are delightfully absurd. If you’ve ever wanted to hear Neal Stephenson dryly comment on the current state of video-game combat, watch him recruit a Viking berserker to lure a caged CEO into fueling their failing studio’s electricity via human-sized hamster wheel, or witness the same Viking berserker testing a hipster’s reflexes, now’s your chance!

– E

I can’t get enough of…

…the superhero redesigns over at Project: Rooftop! Jemma Salume’s winning entry for the Canary on the Catwalk contest was my first (and possibly still greatest) love (if I could marry an illustration…) (IT’S JUST SO PERFECT), but there’s always something new to catch my eye, often accompanied by tantalizing snippets of imagined storylines.

I wish Denis Medri’s 1950’s Batman reboot were a real thing, for starters; it’s just the perfect blend of retro glam and grit, down to the muddied-up candy hues of the color palette. Betty Paige as Catwoman, hot-rod Batmobile, and leather jackets everywhere – sigh.

Project: Rooftop is also fun in that it highlights one of the most fascinating elements of the superhero genre: the relative freedom that different creators have to weld new themes, aesthetics, and cultural anxieties onto the preexisting chassis of a given character or series. I can’t think of any other contemporary media that enjoy both the long-term continuity and short-term adaptability of a comic-book hero who’s remolded and rebooted (and occasionally resurrected) over the course of countless issues, in the hands of dozens of artists and writers, each seeking to carve out new narrative space and (ideally) to reflect some aspect of contemporary culture. Hellblazer (which has been running continuously since 1988) has to be given particular props in the continuity department, since its timeline progresses and its characters age more or less in real time – in my mind, that level of verisimilitude can bolster the series’ effectiveness as a work of cultural criticism, though I haven’t really read far enough along yet to judge how well John Constantine ages as a character past the ’80’s.

Of course the eerie agelessness of most superheroes simply adds to their status as modern-day quasi-deities. I can’t remember who it was whom I first saw drawing a parallel between the teeming universes of Chinese folk traditions and superhero comics (possibly Barry Hughart? I can’t find the quote, at the moment), but it’s an apt comparison.

– E

Ray Bradbury, R.I.P.

Ray Bradbury passed away yesterday at the age of 91, during the transit of Venus. I’m too stunned to feel right now, but I know I’m going to miss him.

 

Some articles and remembrances (you can find a far more exhaustive list at Charles Tan’s blog here):

  • New York Times obituary
  • Obama’s tribute
  • Caitlín Kiernan (one of my favorite stories of hers is “Bradbury Weather” – it’s an sf tale set on Mars, of course): “He showed me how to rub two words together and make a spark that could become a glorious and terrible inferno.”
  • Neil Gaiman in The Guardian: “Ray Bradbury was the kind of person who would give half a day to a kid who wanted to be a writer when he grew up.”
  • Neil Gaiman’s introduction to The Machineries of Joy
  • Lev Grossman in Time: “Bradbury was a fearless explorer of both outer space and inner— they were really the same thing to him. He loved innocence, but somehow that never impaired his understanding of evil.”
  • Bruce Sterling in the NY Times:“He used to speak of a mystical experience: instead of attending a family funeral, he ran off to a carnival. He found a sideshow huckster named “Mr. Electrico,” who told him that he was not a 12-year-old but a reincarnated spirit. He hit him on the head with an electrical wand and told him to aspire to immortality.

    If it sounds like a half-hour fantasy TV episode, it’s probably because Bradbury wrote so many of those, years later. But more important, it’s a metaphor for sci-fi as a way of life: departing a funereal mainstream culture to play techno-tricks with the tattooed sideshow weirdos.”

– E