Here’s the shiny stuff that caught my eye last week:
♦ In case you didn’t know, Japanese schoolgirls rock. Case in point: a new fad where the young ladies take photos of themselves imitating the Kamehameha, an energy attack seen in the anime Dragon Ball (and thus not to be confused with Kamehameha, the first king of the Hawaiian Islands). Blastr calls the trend “simultaneously funny and awesome,” though I would put more emphasis on the awesome. Click through to see more images in the Blastr gallery. Via.
♦ Turn the Page.
Kinuyu Tanaka reads
Feed, feed, feed your fiction-lovin’ mind:
Flax-golden tales: Deer by Erin Morgenstern
From The Guardian: Sea Story by A.S. Byatt
From Weird Fiction Review: The Love of Beauty by K.J. Bishop. My friend Adam Mills also interviewed Bishop forWFR.
From Tor.com: Running of the Bulls by Harry Turtledove
From Daily Science Fiction: Skipping Stones by Devin Miller, The Tying of Tongues by Kristi DeMeester (I thought DeMeester’s writing was particularly lovely), The Man and the River by Therese Pieczynski, Shadow Play by Liz Argall, and Foundering Fathers by Brian K. Lowe.
Need more? Flavorwire has 10 (more) wonderful short stories to read for free online, and these ten writers are indeed wonderful: George Saunders, E. Annie Proulx, Jorge Luis Borges, Amy Hempel, Vladimir Nabokov, Mary Gaitskill, Karen Russell, Kelly Link, Steven Millhauser, and Denis Johnson.
Need even more? How about poetry? Read the first poems of 10 famous poets: Marcel Proust, Shakespeare, e.e. cummings, Sylvia Plath, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Thomas Hardy, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.
The Instagram of Dorian Gray (via) made me smile—click to embiggen:
♦ Viewers’ Paradise.
Everyone’s been a-buzz with the trailer for The Wolverine. Am I alone in thinking the plot feels a little Superman II-y, when Superman gives up his powers to disastrous consequences? Of course, The Wolverine has more literal and figurative claws than Superman II, but still.
AboveAverageNetwork’s new video, Boy Bandits: The Rise & Fall of Puberty’s Child, is kind of funny, but it features Martha Wash, whom I adore!
Is there anything cuter than The Doctor Puppet? I think not. Check out episode one, The Red X.
In further honor of Doctor Who, I also offer My Drunk Kitchen: Fish Sticks and Custard—ta da! Can I just say I think Hannah Hart and Chris Hardwick are about the cutest people ever? I want to hang out with them. Hannah even makes a “that’s what she said” joke! (Be warned: the language can be NSFW, so be wary if you’re easily offended.)
♦ The Book Nook.
From the delightful Share Your Shelf tumblr:
Talking Covers talks with Alix Ohlin about her books’ covers, including this minimalist stunner for her novel Inside.
Oh, I would definitely have a Read Nest if I could! Click through to see more pictures, and you’ll definitely want one, too.
The Read Nest, built by Dorte Mandrup, a Danish architect
If not a reading nest, how about a book bubble? Found at Book Mania!
Cocoon 1, created by Swiss designers at Micasa LAB
Book Mania! also featured this photograph of the 20-foot high bookshelf of Marcus Nispel (director of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre). I swooned, I tell you!
BookRiot asks, Would you join a private library? And I would indeed if it looked like the General Society Library in New York City (pictured below). More images to be seen by clicking the link above or the image.
The Reading Room of The General Society Library in New York City
So many things are perfect about this photo from the book lovers never go to bed alone tumblr:
♦ Riensberg Cemetery in Bremen.
European Cemeteries, a wonderful blog of photographs by Martin Siegling, featured the above-mentioned Riensberg Cemetery. Below are two of my favorite photos, but I hope you’ll click the link (or either of the photos) to see more. Laura, I thought you might find this blog of particular interest.
♦ The Ninth Art.
I had lunch at Mojo’s Famous Burgers & More on Friday and so this mash-up from Super-Team Family had to be shared:
Tim Callahan rereads The Wake, “the tenth and final collection of the original Neil Gaiman Sandman run, [which] collects the four-part title story arc plus two other epilogues, respectively called ‘Exiles’ and ‘The Tempest.’ So it’s an epilogue and then another epilogue and a final epilogue.”
My First Valentine Was Doctor Who (yes, more Doctor Who!) is a magical short comic from Rebecca Mock, who drew it for the comic anthology My First Time Buying Condoms and Other Embarrassing Stories, compiled by Maritsa Patrinos. The first two panels are below, but do click the link above or the image itself to read the entire thing.
Another reason I love A Softer World:
The second part of The Strange World of Martin Kardec at The Secret Knots by Juan Santapau:
Wondermark #924: The Diagrammatical Dilemma:
♦ She Blinded Me … with Science!
Physiology: The science of goosebumps and music chills from AsapScience:
Sexology: Are men who pay for sex normal, or just weird?
Zoology: Luna, a baby polar bear cub at the Buffalo Zoo, plays in the snow. Via.
True Facts about the Naked Mole Rat by Ze Frank taught me a lot about the naked mole rat.
♦ The Writing Desk.
My dear friend Molly shared this link to An Open Letter to Canonical Authors by Daniel Wallace—funny stuff, folks!
For those of you writing a mystery: how to murder someone with bananas and bees.
I enjoyed these fascinating photos of famous authors as teenagers. That’s Ernest Hemingway below, but you can also see photos of teenaged Neil Gaiman, Flannery O’Connor, Philip Roth, Toni Morrison, Mark Twain, Mary Karr, Allen Ginsberg, Martin Amis, Sylvia Plath, J.D. Salinger, Virginia Woolf, Anaïs Nin, Maurice Sendak, Margaret Atwood, and a particularly serious Samuel Beckett.
Chuck Wendig knows 25 ways to be a happy writer (or, at least, happier).
Elizabeth Spann Craig on creative exploration.
Mary Robinette Kowal with another Debut Author lesson on the author photo.
♦ Time to report the sad news (for some): April is indeed going to be the cruelest month for me—if I said aloud how many students essays and stories I had to read and how many critiques I had to write this month, the baby Jesus would cry—so for a while I’m going to suspend Magpie Mondays. I’ll try and post some interesting bits every now and again, and sometime in May I’ll re-start Magpie Mondays, and maybe even have time for additional posts.
Image by Leonid Tishkov
Image by Leonid Tishkov (via).
