Robert E. Stutts

Here are some shiny things that caught my eye recently:

♦ My friend Andrea sent me the link to “Late Bloomers” by Malcolm Gladwell over at The New Yorker. A fascinating article! (And one that lifted my over-40 spirits.)

♦ I’d fork over $75 to experience Sleep No More.

♦ Artist Thomas Doyle has a new show at LeBasse Projects in Culver City, CA, called “Surface to Air,” described thus:

With this new exhibition Doyle continues his Distillation series, which explores an uncanny intersection between destruction and domestic life. Doyle sculpts in a small scale to create model worlds that upend the laws and assumptions of our real one. In “Surface to Air,” houses hover safely above their ruined and burnt foundations while soldiers huddle below. A family goes about its business inside a home that has been cleaved in two. A subterranean house juts from the earth, as a family trudges through an ash-strewn landscape above. Reflective of the apprehension endemic to our times, Doyle’s works also communicate a timeless longing for the stability of home, hearth, and family.

Check out the piece below and several others at LaBasse Projects.

Proxy by Thomas Doyle

Via.

♦ Jo Walton finishes her reflections on Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books with The Other Wind over at Tor.com. She also discusses Pamela Dean’s Secret Country trilogy, which I read as a teenager—and she also mentions there’s another book in the series due out in 2013, so happy news for fans. As much as I loved the Secret Country books, none of them hold a candle—for me—to Dean’s Tam Lin, which I thought was a beyond wonderful reworking of the ballad. I prefer the original Tom Canty cover art (at left) to the artwork on the in-print edition, but that shouldn’t stop you from reading this great book.

Bullshot by Brad Rader

♦ Super Punch previewed some of the newest Battle Babies toys made by Brad Rader and available on Etsy. I think these Battle Babies (like Bullshot, above) are freaky cool. Click through to see some of the other designs and for links to the Etsy store where you can buy your own.

♦ I’ve been enjoying the printed ink tumblr, which features images of “scanned pages of books, or of typed prose/poetry,” like the image at left. Readers of the tumblr are encouraged to submit their own images.

♦ The inimitable Jess Nevins posted on his tumblr the following thought from T.S. Eliot about writing: “Each venture is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate with shabby equipment always deteriorating in the general mess of imprecision of feeling.”

♦ I thought Cameron might enjoy io9’s post about Totally Insane Posters for Movies You May Never Get to See. “Insane” is right. Then cleanse your movie-poster palate here.

♦ Weird Fiction Review has a great interview with the great Tanith Lee.

♦ The interwebs have been a flutter this week about the trailer for Snow White and The Huntsman, due out next summer. Charlize Theron dominates the trailer and makes Kristen Stewart starkly unbelievable as the one “destined to surpass” the Queen as the fairest of them all. I’ll reserve judgment about the film, but I have to say that I am totally in love with this trailer (if nothing else, the movie will look cool):