Tag Archives: Books

The Geek Atlas



What Is an Andy Warhol?





Monsters ink

One of this fall’s most anticipated films is “Where the Wild Things Are,” which attempts to bring the 338 words and 18 pictures of Maurice Sendak’s classic children’s book to life on the big screen. The stakes are high because the book is perfect; its simple story, about a misbehaving kid named Max and the creatures he meets on his imaginary voyage, is now a revered parable about growing up, staying young, and dealing with the unknown. With an army of puppeteers and CGI effects, the filmmakers will also be reacquainting audiences with one of the great supporting casts in children’s books: Sendak’s monsters. The Wild Things – fierce but charming beasts with bulging eyes, fangs, and claws – became, for generations of the book’s fans, iconic. With mismatched animal bodies and goofy, humanoid features, they looked like a cross between ogres and teddy bears. And they promptly claimed a spot in our pop culture bestiary, along with Godzilla, King Kong, and Barney the Dinosaur, where they’ve roamed ever since.



Post-partum à Istanbul

Y aurait-il des romans pour hommes et d’autres pour femmes ?

J’y repensais l’autre jour en lisant Lait noir (Siyah Süt, traduit du turc par Valérie Gay-Aksoy, 339 pages, 22 euros, Phébus). La stambouliote Elif Shafak y fait la chronique de la société dans laquelle elle vit à travers les cas de conscience de ces femmes qui se veulent à la fois mères et artistes. George Steiner a écrit à ce sujet quelques pages dans Réelles présences. Les arts du sens qui firent scandale en 1991. Il y soutenait que le monopole masculin dans les arts, la littérature et surtout la composition musicale n’était pas le résultat de l’asservissement domestique, de l’oppression phallocratique ou des conditions socio-historiques mais bien d’autre chose :”La capacité biologique de procréer, d’engendrer la vie qui est le propre de la femme, n’est-elle pas de quelque façon, à un niveau absolument essentiel à l’être de la femme, tellement créatrice, tellement épanouissante, qu’en comparaison, la création de personnes fictives qui est la matière même du drame et des arts plastiques, en pâlisse ?” On s’en doute, ce n’est du tout le discours que tient Elif Shafak : son Lait noir oscille plutôt entre Le Deuxième sexe, Une Chambre à soi et Doris Lessing.



Manual of Architectural Possibilities

Open the poster up and there are habitats excavated directly from the ice, their dimensions and size based on the carving radius of industrial digging machines; there are seed archives entombed throughout the polar glaciers, marked only by GPS; there are abandoned airplanes all hooked together into a grounded megastructure and reused as research labs; there is a catalog of snow crystal geometry; and there is a photo-survey of exploratory housing for visiting scientists.


Why are we still reading Dickens?



Then a hand shot up in the middle of the room.

“But why should we still read this stuff?”






Book ‘Em –It’s criminal how much some people love books.


Whatever their motivation, however, book collectors help to preserve this physical culture and ensure that our printed matter will still exist in the future. They are the most likely to fight libraries for the preservation of old newspapers or dig around estate sales and attics to find lost manuscripts by writers like Poe or Blake. Book thieves, on the other hand, not only destroy our cultural artifacts, but also hinder an understanding of our history. Most book thieves are misunderstood by the criminal justice system as petty criminals, and they are let go with slaps on the wrist. Gilkey was one such criminal until members of the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America banded together under the watch of Ken Sanders and assisted in sting operations and helped document his crimes. The ABAA continues to fight for longer sentences and heftier fines, as many of these book thieves are repeat offenders. Hopefully more judges will follow the lead of the one presiding over the trial of Daniel Spiegelman, subject of Travis McDade’s 2006 The Book Thief, whose bounty totaled $1.8 million in rare books and documents, including a 13th-century Euclidean geometry textbook. In her decision, the judge stated, “This crime was quite different from the theft of cash equal to the appraised value of the materials stolen, because it deprived not only Columbia [University], but the world, of irreplaceable pieces of the past and the benefits of future scholarship.”

Reading Bartlett’s descriptions of book collections and the attachments people have to them was particularly bittersweet

(for @Maikwl =)