Here are some shiny things that caught my eye recently:
♦ My thanks to my friend Laura Crary for sending me this image, a still life with books by Stockholm artist Maria Friberg (part of her Still Lives series, 2003-2007). I love it!
Her work is really interesting. From her description:
Most of my work revolves about themes of power, masculinity and man’s relationship to nature. In my images, I create ambiguous tableaus that challenge preconceived notions about identity, gender and social hierarchies.My most recent pieces look both outwards, to the challenges in contemporary society, and inwards, to a meditative state of mind. In these photographs and videos, the isolation and solitude of the individuals reflect issues in society at large. The men in my images are signs for men, trying to find their place in times of turmoil.
Do check out Friberg’s webpage through the link above (I also love the subtitle of her site: “Between solitude and power”).
♦ Bruce Bickford‘s miniature version of the town of Twin Peaks really makes me want to watch the TV show again:
Miniature Twin Peaks by Bruce Bickford
Check out more pictures at Sam Howzit’s Flickr (including Bickford’s miniatures of the Red Room, the train car, the Double R Diner, and Dale Cooper at the entrance to the Black Lodge). Bickford’s webpage also has more, albeit smaller, pictures of his Twin Peaks miniatures. Via.
♦ From Tom Gauld‘s tumblr, You’re All Just Jealous of My Jetpack:
By the by, his new book, Goliath, is quite fine.
♦ Book Nook.
Check out “The Glass Noose” by Will Ludwigsen, a Postcard Story that makes me think twice about eating at those Cracker Barrel-style restaurants….
This past week AlphaBooks, an alphabetical tumblr exploration of fictional characters curated by Ben Towle, has moved to the G’s. My favorite was, of course, by Leah Palmer Preiss: G is for Gregor Samsa from Franz Kafka’s The Metamorphosis.
G is for Gregor Samsa by Leah Palmer Preiss
One of my favorite new blogs, the Underground New York Public Library “is a visual library featuring the Reading-Riders of the NYC subways. This library freely lends out a reminder that we’re capable of traveling to grab depths within ourselves and as a whole. Ourit Ben-Haim takes the pictures.” I couldn’t resist sharing this image of a subway rider reading one of my favorite books, The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov. It’s also funny that the magazine reader beside him had a vodka ad open at the time the picture was taken.
Photograph by Ourit Ben-Haim
Lord of the Rings fans will enjoy the interactive timeline of Middle-Earth (from Years of the Trees to the Fourth Age) by Emil Johansson. Each event is linked to a spot on a map. The timeline is part of his Lord of the Rings Project, which includes a massive family tree and a world map. Via.
Two websites you should know about: first, A Mighty Girl has launched recently with the aim of being “the world’s largest collection of books and movies for parents, teachers, and others dedicated to raising smart, confident, and courageous girls and, of course, for girls themselves!” Second, if you don’t already know about it, check out Guys Read, “a web-based literacy program for boys” created by author Jon Scieszka with a mission “to help boys become self-motivated, lifelong readers.”
♦ The Guardian asks why are we in love with witches? (I know why I love them.) They even include a quiz testing your knowledge of witches in YA novels. And Super Punch featured some Witch House sculptures by artist Annie Owens, like this one:
♦ The Ninth Art.
Recently, I came across a nifty new blog: The Official Handbook of the Marvel Universe REDUXE Edition, which “invites a select group of disparate cartoonists and artists to come together in order to recreate every single character entry in the original Official Handbook to the Marvel Universe (Deluxe Edition) in their own inimitable style.” Being an organizational/categorizing nerd, I really loved when Marvel put out the OHttMU (and DC’s similar handbook, Who’s Who), and I love the concept of this blog. A lot of the art is fantastic (do click through the link above to check it out), but I had to pick my favorite Marvel super-hero to share, Dr. Strange, re-imagined by Michel Fiffe:
If you like your Marvel heroes all fantasy-medieval, check out these pictures (I think my favorites are Nick Fury and Loki).
Juan Santapau is back with a new comic at The Secret Knots called “Captions,” a strange and wonderful piece about subtitling foreign-languge films.
Are there really only about half a dozen A-list superheroes?
Last week I read and loved League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Century 2009 by Alan Moore and Kevin O’Neill. I’ve read Jess Nevins’ excellent annotations on this book, but I’d still like to talk with someone about my favorite part, which is when (don’t highlight the following if you want to stay spoiler-free) Mary Poppins shows up as a literal deus ex machina (if an umbrella might be considered a machine) to clean up everything. She also gives a monologue that still makes me tingly: “Tsk. Just the one book? I’m on every page. Who did you think you were talking to? … I rocked the fretful baby gods to sleep before time started, and I am companion to the women who paste up the stars. The quarters of the world are bound unto my compass. I have taken tea with earthquakes. I know what the bee knows….”
♦ Fun with organization! Enjoy this New York Times slide show wherein a flight attendant demonstrates “how to pack enough for a 10-day trip into a single standard carry-on.” For many years now when I’ve traveled I’ve refused to check luggage and only pack what I can fit into a carry-on (sometimes even for trips that are a little longer than 10 days), and I can tell you that these tips are excellent because I have used most of them.
Also, this xkcd cartoon just cracked me up!
♦ Tim Kreider’s article, “The ‘Busy’ Trap,” has gotten some buzz, and rightly so. It’s a good read, breaking down the whys of how we’ve all become so busy, with the main explanation for the phenomenon summed up thus: “Busyness serves as a kind of existential reassurance, a hedge against emptiness; obviously your live cannot possibly be silly or trivial or meaningless if you are so busy, completely booked, in demand every hour of the day.” I certainly can admit that I’m one of those people who’s always busy and who chooses to be so, but my reasons for being busy aren’t completely covered in his article. This article is a good starting point to think about how one really wants to live one’s life, no?
♦ Science (natural and social) stuff.
Check out these cool articles:
Does Easter Island hold the secret of reversing Alzheimer’s Disease?
The amazingly disgusting science of cheese. Ah, cheese. I don’t care how disgusting your science is; I will always love you desperately.
Trickle-down distress: how America’s broken meritocracy drives our national anxiety epidemic. Via Christopher Barzak on Facebook.
Why the left-brain right-brain myth will probably never die.
Surefire tips and tricks to convince people you have psychic powers. (In case you’re wondering, I think this article is about psychology.)
Surely this test is a kind of science? Take the FM100 Hue Test from X-Rite to see how well you see color (apparently “1 out of 255 women and 1 out of 12 men have some form of color vision deficiency”). The lower your score, the better your color acuity. According to the test, I have perfect color acuity (I scored a 0). What’s your score?
♦ A Locus Roundtable on Geek Culture with writers F. Brett Cox, Jeffrey Ford, Terry Bisson, Stefan Dziemianowicz, Cat Rambo, Siobhan Carroll, Theodora Goss, Paul Witcover, Karen Burnham, Ellen Klages, Guy Gavriel Kay, Paul Graham Raven, Cecelia Holland, Gary K. Wolfe, Russell Letson, Kathleen Ann Goonan, Ellen Datlow, Charles Tan, Karen Joy Fowler, and Fabio Fernandes (sorry: I wasn’t going to list everyone but then I couldn’t decide who not to list). Cameron Cook, I think you’ll appreciate the discussion of The Big Bang Theory that starts with Wolfe’s comment not quite halfway down the page and threads its way through the rest of the discussion.
♦ Viewers’ Paradise.
Speaking of Cameron, I’d meant to link last week to his blog post on Why Breaking Bad is My Great American Novel. He gives a thoughtful, eloquent, and convincing analysis of Mad Men and Breaking Bad. I love Mad Men, but prior to reading Cameron’s post I didn’t think I’d ever watch Breaking Bad, despite how much he and other friends have raved about it. Now, because of that post, I’ve started watching it and agree that it is fantastic. The power of words, people!
New images from Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit.
♦ Writers’ Corner.
Over at Necessary Fiction, Matthew Salesses offers 20 excellent tips for revision. A lot of these tips will be familiar, but some are unique. I particularly appreciate the way he phrases certain ideas, like his use of the verb “value,” as in “Value nouns and verbs over adjectives and especially adverbs” (not “cut all adverbs!”) or “value consonance and assonance over alliteration” (even if I can’t do that myself—I’ve too much of the Old English in me, baby). Good stuff. Via.
Janice Hardy offered some good advice about going both ways: outlines for plot, panther for character.
In 7 Ways You Give Away Your Power—and How to Avoid It, Rachelle Gardner talks about how “writers seeking publication are vulnerable to specific ways of giving away their power if they’re not careful.” Also at Gardner’s blog, guest blogger Mike Duran asks, How Hard Should We Make Our Readers Work? He makes a pretty simple distinction between literary and genre fiction: “Literary fiction requires more work on the part of the reader than commercial fiction does.” There are clearly exceptions to that distinction on both sides, but do those exceptions prove or disprove the rule?
Justine Larbalestier writes about research for novels.
♦ All hail the Green Men!
♦ Here’s a new clip from animator Robb Pratt (he’s worked on Disney’s Tarzan, Pocahontas, Kick Buttowski, and Kim Possible) with a 1940s-style Superman cartoon, Bizarro Classic (if you’re not familiar with Bizarro, he’s the result of Superman’s being hit with Lex Luthor’s duplicating ray which creates a “mirror image” Superman who is the exact opposite). Pratt does some fun things, including a pop-out curl and backwards theme music. Via. Also, check out Pratt’s Superman Classic, which is lots of fun, too.
Sarcastic Voyage, a comedy podcast, made this conversation about Before Watchmen between puppet-versions of Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman, which was silly and hilarious. (There are three episodes at the moment, all viewable at youtube or at Sarcastic Voyage.) Via.
This video is burning up the interwebs, so I might as well add to its wildfire spread: when Jeremiah McDonald was 12 he made a videotape of himself talking to his future self, and 32-year-old Jeremiah filled in the blanks, snark and all. Really funny stuff.
♦ I love this photograph by Andreas Feininger, so sad and lonely, and those perfect nimbi! Found at the always remarkable Sutured Infection.
