Paper Pills

This Week’s Goal: Be a Flâneur

May 10, 2009 in gewgaws

In the same issue of Five Dials that I referred to earlier, Alain de Botton offers some thoughts on the flâneur:

[Baudelaire] settled on a word to capture the attitude he felt one should adopt when walking along the streets. One should become, he suggested, a flâneur…The defining characteristic of those flâneurs is that they don’t have any practical goals in mind. They aren’ t walking to get something, or to go somewhere, they aren’t even shopping…Flâneurs are standing in deliberate opposition to capitalist society, with its two great imperatives: to be in a hurry and to buy things…What the flâneurs are doing is looking.

Something to keep in mind as I take off the next week on vacation.

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Daylight Savings Time

May 10, 2009 in gewgaws

This spring, I took a letterpress class at the School of Visual Arts. Printing and book-binding have interested me since college, and I felt it was high time for me to become reacquainted with a Vandercook.

For my final project, I adapted a poem by Kevin Young, “Daylight Savings Time,” by removing letters from the poem. Here’s the original page, after successive printings, some cutting, and some preliminary folds:

Thanks to the excellent How To Make Books, I turned this page into a simple accordion book and bound with blue paper. Here are the pages, post-binding:

(Don’t know if you can see it, but only an apostrophe remains.)

So there you have it! Books. They’re not just for reading—they’re also for making. I hope I can continue to make more of these little books, although I think my next project is going to be a, um, Shmather’s Shmay Shmard. (Trying not to ruin the surprise.)

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The Tyranny of the To-Read Pile

April 1, 2009 in gewgaws

I was going over some of the old news items that I had bookmarked for posting in the past couple of months—you know, during those dark days when you thought this blog had died an inconspicuous death. One of them, from last December, remains relevant: “The Tyranny of the To-Read Pile” from The Guardian.*

Yes, it seems simple enough to suggest that, during these trying economic times, we turn to the books that we’ve hoarded but never read. Squirrels do it with acorns; why not I? For what purpose have I been haunting used book sales and slapping down Border’s ubiquitous 40% off coupons than for this very moment? If I liked, I could not buy another book for the rest of my life and still have more than enough books to read (no, seriously, I have about two bookcases worth of unread books. Two bookcases.).

And yet…with bookstores on the brink of bankruptcy, the discount coupons are flowing ever more freely. And with the industry-wide layoffs, the pickings on the “take shelves” (as in, “take these books, because I’m not taking them with me”) are better than ever.

And that damn to-read pile grows more despotic.

*Which, as it turns out, is switching to an all-Twitter format after 188 years in print.

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Of all the feral things

March 18, 2009 in gewgaws

I just found out that there are 20+ feral parrots living in Brooklyn’s Greenwood Cemetery. Feral parrots? What? Where did they come from?

So many parrots!

Yep, definitely from Brooklyn.

(Photos via BrooklynParrots.com, which leads me to believe that wild parrots in Brooklyn are not all that uncommon)

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Gasp—there are aspects to publishing that don’t involve editors?!

March 16, 2009 in gewgaws

I hardly ever talk about my job on this blog, because I like it too much to lose it over some indiscretion, but I can reveal that I work in the advertising, promotions, and new media department of my particular publishing group. You usually don’t hear too much about this side of publishing, because it’s not about editing or throwing book parties. But The Guardian, one of the few newspapers that still gives a crap about books (not based in the U.S., obviously), has a nice piece from a publishing marketing executive that provides some insight into my 9-to-5 activities.

(via the always hilarious Bookninja)

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Macaroni and Cheese Battle Royale

March 16, 2009 in gewgaws

As an homage/throwing down of the gauntlet to my friend Brendon‘s post on macaroni and cheese, I made my own. The recipe different from Brendon’s in the following respects:
- Fusilli instead of elbow macaroni
- Cayenne instead of paprika
- My choice of cheeses: Vermont cheddar, Parmigiano-Reggiano, gouda, and mascarpone
It was delicious, especially after adding a few dashes of hot sauce to cut the mild sweetness of the mascarpone.

(Yes, those are my multivitamins.)

So what now, Brendon!? Anything you can do, I can do…adequately.

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Back, by negligible demand.

March 14, 2009 in gewgaws

Hi, everyone. I’m back after a long, ill-fated undertaking that occupied me from September through March. Much of the book news that I had bookmarked during this Dark Age is no longer relevant, so I guess I’ll start from scratch—and with more personal details! For example, I am sitting on my sister’s couch, competing with her cat for the dregs of some cheese crackers!

Actually, maybe I’ll leave out the personal details.

Above is a tag cloud of everything I’ve written on this site so far (via Wordle). I find it alarming that I talk about Palefaces so much, but I am equally alarmed about my emphasis on the American intellectual and, ugh, deconstruction. I think from here on out, I’m going to make an emphasis to read more works in translation…and to tell you more about it.

Stay tuned.

Also, here’s a picture of my sister’s cat:

Scary!

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Réne Girard

September 2, 2008 in gewgaws

French intellectual Réne Girard gave a provocative interview to Il Foglio in March 2007, and it has only recently been translated and pubished in English. In this interview Girard rails against post-modernism, calling the movement’s denial of overarching truths a “castration against meaning.” Here’s a sample bit:

Q: Unfortunately, today there is only one definition of violence, that of pure aggression.

A: This is because one wants to render oneself innocent. Human violence, however, is the result of desire and imitation. Postmodernism is not able to speak of violence. Violence is placed in parentheses and its origin is simply ignored. And with it, the most important truth: that reality is in some measure knowable.

I like the daring vehemence with which Girard denounces post-modernism as conspiracy. I do believe that reality is in some measure knowable, and that it’s not altogether fruitless to come up with ways to define the human experience, at least by certain parameters. No one wants to feel predetermined or stereotyped, but I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice by not extrapolating from our experiences. I guess it all goes back to the meaning of life itself: why do we exist if not to learn something from being alive?

In this vein, Girard goes on to say:

This nihilism of our time is also called deconstruction, or simply ‘theory.’ But if nihilism is transformed simply into a respectable philosophical ‘theory,’ then everything becomes frivolous, everything is a play on words, everything is a joke. So we may begin with the deconstruction of language, but we then finish with the laboratory deconstruction of the human being.

(Via Bookforum)

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VAMPIRE AUSTEN!

June 13, 2008 in gewgaws

No, seriously.

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Hi, I’m Back.

June 3, 2008 in gewgaws

Sorry it’s been so long between posts. I was all working overtime and subsequently vacationing in Paris. You know how it goes. In any case, I haven’t slowed on my reading—if anything, I’ve been reading more than ever. I only post on the books that elicit enough of a response that I feel I can ramble on for paragraphs, but if you’re interested to read micro-reviews of all those books that come and go in the upper right hand corner of this blog, check out my GoodReads page.

In the meantime, here’s a poem I read in a recent issue of The New Yorker that gave me pause:

A Primer

I remember Michigan fondly as the place I go
to be in Michigan. The right hand of America
waving from maps or the left
pressing into clay a mold to take home
from kindergarten to Mother. I lived in Michigan
forty-three years. The state bird
is a chained factory gate. The state flower
is Lake Superior, which sounds egotistical
though it is merely cold and deep as truth.
A Midwesterner can use the word “truth,”
can sincerely use the word “sincere.”
In truth the Midwest is not mid or west.
When I go back to Michigan I drive through Ohio.
There is off I-75 in Ohio a mosque, so life
goes corn corn corn mosque, I wave at Islam,
which we’re not getting along with
on account of the Towers as I pass.
Then Ohio goes corn corn corn
billboard, goodbye, Islam. You never forget
how to be from Michigan when you’re from Michigan.
It’s like riding a bike of ice and fly fishing.
The Upper Peninsula is a spare state
in case Michigan goes flat. I live now
in Virginia, which has no backup plan
but is named the same as my mother,
I live in my mother again, which is creepy
but so is what the skin under my chin is doing,
suddenly there’s a pouch like marsupials
are needed. The state joy is spring.
“Osiris, we beseech thee, rise and give us baseball”
is how we might sound were we Egyptian in April,
when February hasn’t ended. February
is thirteen months long in Michigan.
We are a people who by February
want to kill the sky for being so gray
and angry at us. “What did we do?”
is the state motto. There’s a day in May
when we’re all tumblers, gymnastics
is everywhere, and daffodils are asked
by young men to be their wives. When a man elopes
with a daffodil, you know where he’s from.
In this way I have given you a primer.
Let us all be from somewhere.
Let us tell each other everything we can.

—Bob Hicok

I wanted to write something similar about Connecticut, and then I quickly realized that I was 1.) too lazy and 2.) such an endeavor would be hokey and very high-school English class. Sorry, Connecticut!

And speaking of The New Yorker, in last week’s issue, there was a brilliant essay on Milton entitled “Return to Paradise: The enduring relevance of John Milton.” I totally groaned when I first saw the essay, but I’m so glad I read it. Jonathan Rosen’s discussion of Paradise Lost‘s function (well, partial function) as a response to then-contemporary political events is a welcome reminder of that poem’s multi-faceted importance. And a reminder of my shame in only having read excerpts of the poem. Mere excerpts! AUGH.

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