Giant Bookcase Painted on Garage Door

Photograph by wootkatiee on reddit

Reddit user wootkatiee spotted this garage door painted like a giant bookcase in the Los Angeles neighbourhood of Hollywood Hills.



Via: TwistedSifter

Vintage Van Carries Literature Around Lisbon

Tell a Story  offers a collection of more than a dozen Portuguese classics that have been translated into English, French, Italian, German and Spanish. There's something for everyone, from the evasive and sad verses of Fernando Pessoa — "To be understood is to prostitute oneself" — to Antonio Lobo Antunes' dense and moving accounts of the country's post-colonial legacy.

More:  NPR

The Silent Wife

I chose this as the first audiobook to listen to on my new treadmill because I figured it would be easy to follow without the need to flip back to parts I didn't grasp. 

Jodi and Todd have lived together for twenty years and are comfortable in their waterfront condo in Chicago. He is a property developer, she is a part-time therapist. She keeps house and makes creative meals for him and he is the primary breadwinner and they both seem content with the affluent life they have made for themselves. Then the relationship goes off the rails when Todd begins an affair with the young daughter of his best friend. Jodi reacts robotically to the betrayal; she doesn't confront the cheating s.o.b. or even discuss it with him and appears to be in denial. It's business as usual for Jodi until she discovers that Todd plans to marry the silly young thing and that in Illinois she will not be entitled to a red cent because she and Todd never tied the knot. When she receives a letter from Todd's lawyer telling her to vacate the condo Jodi swings into action to protect what she feels she's entitled to after two decades of  living with the obnoxious Todd.

Both Todd and Jodi are shallow, self indulgent types and frankly I didn't care what happened to either of them. The book chugs along slowly, the murder occurs and it comes to an abrupt and ambiguous closing. As a treadmill book it hit the spot but it was not the "psychological thriller" I'd been led to expect. I don't feel guilty about spending time on a lightweight novel because I was burning calories at the same time.

Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself

Artist and illustrator Allen Crawford  has illuminated Walt Whitman’s “Song of Myself.” Crawford has turned the original sixty-page poem from Whitman’s 1855 edition into a sprawling 234-page work of art.

More: Whitman Illuminated: Song of Myself

Brickjest

Brickjest is Infinite Jest in Legos.

p. 3 These are three Deans--of Admissions, Academic Affairs, Athletic Affairs.
I do not know which face belongs to whom.

P. 11. 'I ate this,' was what I was saying. I held the patch out to the Moms . . .

Virginia Woolf’s London

From her childhood to her later life digs, Londonist has mapped the London of Virginia Woolf.

More: Londonist

Cautionary Children’s Books

Terrifying cautionary children's tales from 1830-1835

More illustrations from:  Cautionary Children’s Books

A Picture Of Language: The Fading Art Of Diagramming Sentences

Diagramming and parsing are the best way of learning the structure of language. After 50 years I still remember these skills.

"It's a fairly simple idea," says Kitty Burns Florey, the author of Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog: The Quirky History and Lost Art of Diagramming Sentences. "I like to call it a picture of language. It really does draw a picture of what language looks like."

More: NPR

Via 

Color Me Drunk: A Drinking and Drawing Activity Book

For those who are bored of beer pong and have already drunk-dialed all of their exes, this drink-and-draw activity book provides page upon page of novel ways to spend a happy hour (or three).



See preview: Google Books

One-Star Book Reviews

Reviews of classic books, culled from the internet's think tank.

“There was cat hair all over the books pages. i am allergic. That is all.”

“he is to serious literature what Weird Al Yankovic is to pop music.”

“I felt like Camus was trying to make some kind of a point”

More: One-Star Book Reviews

Via

Limited Edition Book Of Birds

A charming book of bird illustrations created using images from the BioDiversity Heritage Library.

Available to buy from Good Press (Glasgow).



More: Textbook Studio

Jack Kerouac's Road - A Franco-American Odyssey

This film presents the life and work of Jack Kerouac, an American writer with Quebec roots who became one of the most important spokesmen for his generation. Intercut with archival footage, photographs and interviews, this film takes apart the heroic myth and even returns to the childhood of the author whose life and work contributed greatly to the cultural, sexual and social revolution of the 1960s.

Jack Kerouac's Road - A Franco-American Odyssey by Herménégilde Chiasson, National Film Board of Canada

NFB

“I am almoost beshytten”

The following phrases have been excerpted from an English to Latin textbook printed in the early 16th century, which has been digitized by the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford as part of an ongoing project:

1.
Good morrowe.
Good nyght.
God spede.
How farest thou.
I fare well thanked be god.
Whyder goest thou.
I go to the syege.
I shall bere the company.
How doth my fader.
He was at the poynt of dethe.
Gyue me breed.
Thou shalt haue ony thynge that I haue.
Drynke first and I wyll nexte.
Drynke agayne.
I am sure thou louest me not.

Read more here

Via

Scary Books

Books that are smart and scary—just frightening enough for catharsis, and just exotic enough in their trappings that you'll probably still be able to sleep at night, if you're not lying awake thrilled by just how good they are.

The only one of the ten that I've read is Specimen Days by Michael Cunningham which I reviewed here. It was unsettling but I didn't find it scary. The most terrifying book I ever read was The Charcoal Burners by Susan Musgrave. Thirty-five years later it still haunts me.


More: 10 Creepiest Books

Jane Austen Used Pins to Edit Her Manuscript

Editing today is a breeze but not so when Jane Austin was writing.  She had no Whiteout or Post It Notes to aid in revising her work so she used straight pins to make edits to her rare manuscript, The Watsons.

 The full pages suggest that Jane Austen did not anticipate a protracted process of redrafting. With no calculated blank spaces and no obvious way of incorporating large revision or expansion she had to find other strategies – the three patches, small pieces of paper, each of which was filled closely and neatly with the new material, attached with straight pins to the precise spot where erased material was to be covered or where an insertion was required to expand the text.

More:  Open Culture

Bukowski's "My Cats"

Born today in 1920 author Charles Bukowski.

MY CATS

I know. I know.
they are limited, have different
needs and
concerns.

but I watch and learn from them.
I like the little they know,
which is so
much.

they complain but never
worry,
they walk with a surprising dignity.
they sleep with a direct simplicity that
humans just can’t
understand.

their eyes are more
beautiful than our eyes.
and they can sleep 20 hours
a day
without
hesitation or
remorse.

when I am feeling
low
all I have to do is
watch my cats
and my
courage
returns.

I study these
creatures.

they are my
teachers.

The Food Chain

Virgil Marcel is a young restaurateur who owns one of L.A.'s trendiest eating establishments and is also the scion of the Golden Boy fast-food dynasty. He receives an unexpected invitation to the Everlasting Club in London, England which has been in operation for 350 years and is wrapped in an air of secrecy. When he arrives he finds members gorging themselves at an orgiastic banquet. He makes a spectacle of himself at the club, is banished and embarks on a debauched food tour of England with a young woman who was a nude centrepiece on the table at the club. Virgil's parents and his chef also enter the fray. Not one of the characters is remotely likeable.

In alternate chapters we are given factual accounts of gastronomic and sexual overindulgence over the centuries. It's all dark, twisted and over the top. I read the book through to the end but didn't feel much like eating for a long time after finishing it.

Beautiful Girl

A lovely short story by Tobias Wolff:

When I was fifteen, I cut off the last joint of my left ring finger during a woodshop class. I was laughing at a joke while cutting a board on a table saw. The bite of the blade sent a great shock through me, and I didn’t dare look down, but the bleached faces of the other boys told me just how bad it was.

Read more: The New Yorker

Bukowski On Writing

 Charles Bukowski. Uncensored. from Quoted on Vimeo.

In this inaugural episode of Quoted‘s animated literary series for Harper Collins, the legendary Charles Bukowski talks very candidly about his writing process in a conversation that took place in 1993 during the recording of Run With the Hunted.

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Sticky Monsters

Copenhagen based artist, writer and tv director John Kenn Mortensen draws scary monsters on Post-it notes and it's amazing how much detail he can squeeze onto three inch square office supplies. Below are illustrations from his children's book Sticky Monsters.

Via Boing Boing

Thanks Bruce!

C.S. Lewis’s Ideal Daily Routine

For if I could please myself I would always live as I lived there. I would choose always to breakfast at exactly eight and to be at my desk by nine, there to read or write till one. If a cup of good tea or coffee could be brought me about eleven, so much the better. A step or so out of doors for a pint of beer would not do quite so well; for a man does not want to drink alone and if you meet a friend in the taproom the break is likely to be extended beyond its ten minutes. At one precisely lunch should be on the table…
By two at the latest I would be on the road. Not, except at rare intervals, with a friend. Walking and talking are two very great pleasures, but it is a mistake to combine them.

More: Brain Pickings

Zelda to Scott Fitzgerald, spring 1919 or 1920

Zelda to Scott Fitzgerald, spring 1919 or 1920:

 I look down the tracks and see you coming – and out of every haze & mist your darling rumpled trousers are hurrying to me – Without you, dearest dearest I couldn’t see or hear or feel or think – or live – I love you so and I’m never in all our lives going to let us be apart another night. It’s like begging for mercy of a storm or killing Beauty or growing old, without you. I want to kiss you so – and in the back where your dear hair starts and your chest – I love you – and I can’t tell you how much – To think that I’ll die without your knowing – Goofo, you’ve got to try to feel how much I do – how inanimate I am when you’re gone – I can’t even hate these damnable people – Nobodys got any right to live but us – and they’re dirtying up our world and I can’t hate them because I want you so – Come Quick – Come Quick to me – I could never do without you if you hated me and were covered with sores like a leper – if you ran away with another woman and starved me and beat me – I still would want you I know –  

Lover, Lover, Darling –

Your Wife

Lifted from Futility Closet

W.B. Yeats Reads Four of His Poems

The great Irish poet William Butler Yeats was born on this day in 1865. To mark the date Open Culture brings you a series of recordings he made for BBC radio in the final decade of his life.
Yeats made these recordings for the wireless in 1932, 1934 and the last on 28 October 1937 when he was 72. He died on January 28 1939. The photograph shows him sitting before the microphone in 1937.

Authors United

A letter signed by more than 900 authors claims Amazon is using authors as leverage in negotiations by blocking the sale of books by Hachette authors and asks Amazon to resolve its dispute with Hachette "without further hurting authors."

A Letter to Our Readers:

Amazon is involved in a commercial dispute with the book publisher Hachette , which owns Little, Brown, Grand Central Publishing, and other familiar imprints. These sorts of disputes happen all the time between companies and they are usually resolved in a corporate back room.

But in this case, Amazon has done something unusual. It has directly targeted Hachette's authors in an effort to force their publisher to agree to its terms.

Read the letter and check out who signed it: Authors United

August 10th, 1842 — Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Note-Book

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s journal entry for August 10, 1842. From The American Note-Books.

August 10th.– The natural taste of man for the original Adam’s occupation is fast developing itself in me. I find that I am a good deal interested in our garden, although, as it was planted before we came here, I do not feel the same affection for the plants that I should if the seed had been sown by my own hands. It is something like nursing and educating another person’s children. Still, it was a very pleasant moment when I gathered the first string-beans, which were the earliest esculent that the garden contributed to our table. And I love to watch the successive development of each new vegetable, and mark its daily growth, which always affects me with surprise. It is as if something were being created under my own inspection, and partly by my own aid. One day, perchance, I look at my bean-vines, and see only the green leaves clambering up the poles; again, to-morrow, I give a second glance, and there are the delicate blossoms; and a third day, on a somewhat closer observation, I discover the tender young beans, hiding among the foliage. Then, each morning, I watch the swelling of the pods and calculate how soon they will be ready to yield their treasures. All this gives a pleasure and an ideality, hitherto unthought of, to the business of providing sustenance for my family. I suppose Adam felt it in Paradise; and, of merely and exclusively earthly enjoyments, there are few purer and more harmless to be experienced. Speaking of beans, by the way, they are a classical food, and their culture must have been the occupation of many ancient sages and heroes. Summer-squashes are a very pleasant vegetable to be acquainted with. They grow in the forms of urns and vases,–some shallow, others deeper, and all with a beautifully scalloped edge. Almost any squash in our garden might be copied by a sculptor, and would look lovely in marble, or in china; and, if I could afford it, I would have exact imitations of the real vegetable as portions of my dining-service. They would be very appropriate dishes for holding garden-vegetables. Besides the summer-squashes, we have the crook-necked winter-squash, which I always delight to look at, when it turns up its big rotundity to ripen in the autumn sun. Except a pumpkin, there is no vegetable production that imparts such an idea of warmth and comfort to the beholder. Our own crop, however, does not promise to be very abundant; for the leaves formed such a superfluous shade over the young blossoms, that most of them dropped off without producing the germ of fruit. Yesterday and to-day I have cut off an immense number of leaves, and have thus given the remaining blossoms a chance to profit by the air and sunshine; but the season is too far advanced, I am afraid, for the squashes to attain any great bulk, and grow yellow in the sun. We have muskmelons and watermelons, which promise to supply us with as many as we can eat. After all, the greatest interest of these vegetables does not seem to consist in their being articles of food. It is rather that we love to see something born into the world; and when a great squash or melon is produced, it is a large and tangible existence, which the imagination can seize hold of and rejoice in. I love, also, to see my own works contributing to the life and well-being of animate nature. It is pleasant to have the bees come and suck honey out of my squash-blossoms, though, when they have laden themselves, they fly away to some unknown hive, which will give me back nothing in return for what my garden has given them. But there is much more honey in the world, and so I am content. Indian corn, in the prime and glory of its verdure, is a very beautiful vegetable, both considered in the separate plant, and in a mass in a broad field, rustling and waving, and surging up and down in the breeze and sunshine of a summer afternoon. We have as many as fifty hills, I should think, which will give us an abundant supply. Pray Heaven that we may be able to eat it all! for it is not pleasant to think that anything which Nature has been at the pains to produce should be thrown away. But the hens will be glad of our superfluity, and so will the pigs, though we have neither hens nor pigs of our own. But hens we must certainly keep. There is something very sociable and quiet, and soothing, too, in their soliloquies and converse among themselves; and, in an idle and half-meditative mood, it is very pleasant to watch a party of hens picking up their daily subsistence, with a gallant chanticleer in the midst of them. Milton had evidently contemplated such a picture with delight.

I find that I have not given a very complete idea of our garden, although it certainly deserves an ample record in this chronicle, since my labors in it are the only present labors of my life. Besides what I have mentioned, we have cucumber-vines, which to-day yielded us the first cucumber of the season, a bed of beets, and another of carrots, and another of parsnips and turnips, none of which promise us a very abundant harvest. In truth, the soil is worn out, and, moreover, received very little manure this season. Also, we have cabbages in superfluous abundance, inasmuch as we neither of us have the least affection for them; and it would be unreasonable to expect Sarah, the cook, to eat fifty head of cabbages. Tomatoes, too, we shall have by and by. At our first arrival, we found green peas ready for gathering, and these, instead of the string-beans, were the first offering of the garden to our board.

Lifted from Biblioklept

Reinventing the Book

Open Book Project contributor Doug Beube reimagines the book as a
reconstructible sculpture of maps and zippers. (The Open Book Project)

How can someone make predictions about the future of books?

Leslie Atzmon and Ryan Molloy, Eastern Michigan University art professors specializing in graphic design, have been trying to figure that out. Their Open Book Project has resulted in an exhibition, workshops, and a 248-page book, all spotlighting artists and designers exploring various forms that books might take.



More: The Atlantic

Samuel Beckett Motivational Cat Posters

More at Beckittns

Via Blort

On Joyce and Syphilis, by Kevin Birmingham

"The most unsettling prospect to certain Joyceans is not that Joyce’s life was ravaged by a sexually transmitted disease but that amid the mountains of scholarly research into Joyce’s acquaintances and influences, his primary-school education, his eating habits, his love letters, the songs he sang, and the marginalia he scrawled in his books, the most talked-about writer of the twentieth century has never really been seen." 

More: Harper's Magazine

He Liked His Cake Sweeter.

He liked his cake sweeter. And he usually drank his coffee with whipped cream and a dash of vanilla. The waiter would have none of it.

—Georges Simenon, The Man Who Watched Trains Go By



Via Ferocious Sprout 

Pro-gun picture book for children aims to reassure kids about parents' weapons

I thought this was going to be a satirical piece. I'm astonished and saddened that it's not.

My Parents Open Carry, by Brian Jeffs and Nathan Nephew, co-founders of the pro-gun Michigan Open Carry, has been released by small US publisher White Feather Press. The picture-book fellows a "typical Saturday running errands and having fun together" for 13-year-old Brenna Strong and her parents, say the authors. "What's not so typical is that Brenna's parents lawfully open carry handguns for self-defence."

More: The Guardian

New Finnish Writing in English

Words Without Borders, the online journal of literature in English translation, has published an issue devoted to contemporary Finnish literature, featuring interesting recent works by thirteen Finnish authors.

Via The Chawed Rosin who did some of the translation.

Mapping ‘Madeline’ Creator’s New York Haunts

Madeline, the smallest of the “twelve little girls in two straight lines” who lived in “an old house in Paris that was covered in vines,” was born in Manhattan. In Pete’s Tavern on Irving Place in 1938, Ludwig Bemelmans scrawled those first rhyming lines that would introduce his petite heroine of the Madeline books. To mark the centenary of the children’s book author and illustrator stepping into Gotham, the New-York Historical Society opened Madeline in New York: The Art of Ludwig Bemelmans earlier this month. In conjunction with the exhibition, illustrator Adrienne Ottenberg created a map of “Bemelmans’ New York.”

More Here