Echo Chamber

At long last, my interview with Damion Searls is up in the Interrogation Room. Damion wrote two of the most interesting books from last year – a book of short stories, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going, and a new version of Melville’s Moby-Dick entitled ; or The Whale. He’s a prolific translator (three stories by Robert Walser just appeared in Vice), and his translation informs his writing (see “Sits the Queen” in the same issue). I talked with him about his various writing projects: I suspect we’re going to be hearing a lot from him in the future.

For the past year, I’ve been keeping track of the books I’ve finished, the films I’ve watched, the exhibits I’ve seen. There’s a retrospective urge here: to keep track of what I ingest, to know what’s shaping me culturally. It’s useful for end-of-the-year lists, which I neglected to put out in 2009. Now I have lists, and I’m not sure what to make of them. My list-keeping is, of course, a deeply flawed project. In my books, the problems are legion. What “finishing” means, for example: the books that I haven’t finished are in some cases more important than the books that I ostensibly finished. I spent a lot of time last year reading Finnegans Wake, though claiming to finish that book would be an act of hubris more than even I could bear. Not every book that I do finish is finished in the same way: some take a lot of time, some are read knowing that I’ll have to re-read them, some are only given a cursory reading. I tend to finish the books that I start, which helps, ..read more

Paul Collins points out a fantastic-sounding book on his always-entertaining blog: T. A. Richardson’s The Art of Architectural Modelling in Paper, a Victorian guide to constructing detailed architectural models out of paper. Amazon.com can’t find any copies, but Bookfinder turns up a couple. Google Books comes to the rescue, as the book was published in 1859: they have a complete version in reasonable quality – I can’t tell if all the illustrations are there, but the ones that are make me want to start constructing paper and wood models of houses and railroad stations. Be sure to notice the advertising at the end of the book, where there’s a “Catalogue of Rudimentary, Scientific, Educational, and Classical Works for Colleges, High and Ordinary Schools and Self-Instruction; also for Mechanics’ Institutions, Free Libraries, &c., &c., published by James S. Virtue, City Road & Ivy Lane,” most of which look fantastic.

Writers and visual artists overlapped in twentieth-century Italy much more than you might expect. F. T. Marinetti & the Futurists demanded an end to conventional typesetting with parole in libertà which splayed words all over the page. Giorgio de Chirico’s novel Hebdomeros is a better-than-average Surrealist novel; the memoirist Carlo Levi was equally skilled as a painter. Unsurprisingly, there’s a long and varied tradition of the comic book – called fumetti – in Italy, albeit one that hasn’t often been noticed by those who don’t speak Italian. Fotoromanzi, comic books made from posed photographs of actors, were wildly popular after WWII; they inspired films by Michelangelo Antonioni (1949’s short L’amorosa menzogna) and Federico Fellini (The White Sheik) and turn up in Umberto Eco’s illustrated novel The Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana, something of a personal history of the Italian comic book. To that history belongs Dino Buzzati. Buzzati is known in the English-speaking world primarily on the strength of The Tartar Steppe, a novel from 1940 about a frontier garrison awaiting an attack that will never come. Buzzati was immediately pegged as ..read more

One of the books I’ve been most pleasantly surprised by lately is Christien Meinderstma’s Pig 05049. Meinderstma is a Dutch designer; for a project, she decided to document what happened to one local pig (of the eponymous number) after it was butchered. The results turn out to be much more fascinating than you might think, even if you’re squeamish about meat. Pigs, it turns out, are mini-factories on the hoof: Meinderstma turned up 185 different products made from the remains of the 103.7 kg pig that she followed. The book depicts the final products: there’s a lot of meat, of course, but it’s astonishing how the rest of the pig is used. Pig skin, for example, becomes work gloves and glue, but also the collagen used in plastic surgery, beauty masks, energy bars, and Valentine’s Day candy hearts. It’s also used to improve the texture of yoghurt and prepared whipped cream; gelatin made from the collagen is used to clarify beer, wine, and fruit juice, as well as the gel caps used by pills. Products made from bones ends up ..read more

I’ve always been a bit disappointed in how inert the Library of Congress has been when it comes to books in the digital age. Had they had a bit of foresight in the late 1990s, they might have scanned and digitized their vast collection of public domain books published in this country; Google beat them to the punch, and now we have to use a private company’s services to get to what should be our own public domain. Maybe this realization has dawned on someone at the Library of Congress; at any rate, they’ve been unveiling some interesting new content at the website of The Center for the Book, read.gov. What’s new? They’re using the Internet Archive’s page-turning system for the handful of classic books they’ve put online. They haven’t put up very many so far, and it’s unclear how many they intend to put up, but the system they have in place is elegant and readable – much more so than looking at the same books in Google Books, for example. The books presently available for online reading from their ..read more

Hi everyone, I’m Dan Visel, happy to be helping out at the Hotel St. George. For the past five years, I’ve worked at the Institute for the Future of the Book, thinking about how reading and writing are changing; you can read a post I wrote there about HSG’s most recent book here. Before that I worked as a book designer & wrote travel guides, and I also help out with Circumference, a journal of poetry in facing-page translation which appears mostly in print rather than online. I live in Jackson Heights, New York, though I originally hail from the cultural hinterland of the rural Midwest. Various writers & artists that I like off the top of my head in no particular order: Robert Walser, Gertrude Stein, William Gaddis, Marcel Proust, Marcel Duchamp, Raymond Roussel, Giorgio Morandi, John Ashbery, George Leonard Herter, Daniel Spoerri, Donald Barthelme, Jane Bowles, Ray Johnson. I can keep going but I won’t. Lately I’ve been reading Julio Cortázar and wondering why it took me so long; I’m slowly making my way through William Vollmann’s Imperial. You ..read more