And the Oscar goes to …
November 28, 2012 § Leave a comment
We are in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars
or
I can resist everything but temptation.
One of the wittiest spirit of literature is also the most quoted. The Guardian gathered Oscar Wilde’s top 50 epigrams in just one infographic:
via The Guardian
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The usual suspects
October 23, 2012 § Leave a comment
Are you familiar with law enforcement composite sketch software? You know, the software the police uses to create portraits of suspects based on eye-witness descriptions? Well, Brian Joseph Davis had the brilliant idea of using such software with literary descriptions of book characters. Some of the most iconic protagonists are there, from Jesus to Humbert Humbert, and from Jane Eyre to Holly Golightly.
Daisy Buchanan, The Great Gatsby
A casting director’s dream, right?
Captain Ahab, Moby Dick
Unfortunately The Composites tumblr is closing down (but a book is coming out). Just my luck to discover something fun once it is about to end…
via freeweird
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Six degrees of artistic influences
September 21, 2011 § Leave a comment
We have seen her work before, illustrating the food habits of famous writers and poets. Now Wendy MacNaughton illustrates in a visually engaging manner the Circles of Influence, created by Michelle Legro and Maria Popova, which reveal the creative encounters and intersections of different writers, scientists, genres and eras.
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On the road all around the world
May 22, 2011 § 1 Comment
Does a book cover always reflect the essence of the book itself? And how the artistic outcome of the cover changes when the same book is translated in other languages? Check out some vintage book covers of Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” from all around the world.
First edition, 1957
Portugal
Super long list of book covers follows after the jump « Read the rest of this entry »
James Joyce Pornography
May 16, 2011 § 7 Comments
Who would have guessed that the man behind the masterpiece that is Ulysses was such a pervert! Apparently lots of people knew, but anyway I didn’t, at least until earlier today, when F. sent me this link, containing love letters to his future wife Nora. No, love letters is not the correct term. What Joyce was doing was the Victorian equivalent of sexting. With top-notch, ground-breaking writing, of course.
The letters are rich with vivid images of sodomy, flagellation, and an escalating obsession with coprophilia. Want one of the mildest samples?
My love for you allows me to pray to the spirit of eternal beauty and tenderness mirrored in your eyes or fling you down under me on that softy belly of yours and fuck you up behind, like a hog riding a sow, glorying in the very stink and sweat that rises from your arse, glorying in the open shape of your upturned dress and white girlish drawers and in the confusion of your flushed cheeks and tangled hair. It allows me to burst into tears of pity and love at some slight word, to tremble with love for you at the sounding of some chord or cadence of music or to lie heads and tails with you feeling your fingers fondling and tickling my ballocks or stuck up in me behind and your hot lips sucking off my cock while my head is wedged in between your fat thighs, my hands clutching the round cushions of your bum and my tongue licking ravenously up your rank red cunt.
That is why Nora, the woman whose fart Joyce “would pick out in a roomful of farting women”, famously said “I guess the man’s a genius, but what a dirty mind he has, hasn’t he?”
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Lolita butterflies
April 22, 2011 § 1 Comment
Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Lo-lee-ta; the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth. Lo. Lee. Ta.
She was Lo, plain Lo in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock. She was Lola in slacks. She was Dolly at school. She was Dolores on the dotted line. But in my arms she was always Lolita.
Beautiful hand-illustrated butterflies by legendary author and amateur entomologist Vladimir Nabokov on copies of his masterpiece Lolita. Today would be his birthday. April 22nd.
via flavorwire
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In their own words
April 19, 2011 § 3 Comments
If you were a writer and you were about to make your self-portrait, how would you draw yourself? Would you choose to depict an extract from your literary work perhaps? Artist and author John Sokol creates drawings of literary figures, whose outline of the face is crafted from the very words of their own works.
Jorge-Luis Borges and the Secret Miracle
See more portraits after the jump
The Wire, the Victorian novel
March 26, 2011 § 3 Comments
In season 5 episode of The Wire – the season focusing on the Media and in particular on the Baltimore Sun – old-school senior editor Gus Haynes worries about the reporting work of junior writer Scott Templeton and its lack of journalistic evidence (in fact, we, the audience, are aware that his writings are pure fiction). He’s overruled though by the chief editor who, ironically, loves the “Dickensian aspect” of Templeton’s articles. This mock mention, The Wire creator David Simon has admitted, was used as a reply to all critics who compared his work to Dickens’ – a comparison he felt was flattering but falling badly on him.
Well, new historic evidence has come up!
In fact, The Wire was a serialized novel of Dickens’ contemporary Horatio Bucklesby Ogden and illustrated by Baxter “Bubz” Black. An overlooked Victorian masterpiece, The Wire failed to grasp the attention of the reading masses but was praised by literary scholars. In fact, Dickens’ later works, like Bleak House and A Tale of Two Cities, seem to have been influenced by The Wire. 
Or so says a thoroughly enjoyable faux literary journal article for The Hooded Utilitarian by Sean Michael Robinson and Joy Delyria. An appropriate homage to the Wire, the article is written with impressive attention to detail, including the amazing illustrations above. It’s high point? The analysis of Omar Little as a gothic hero.
I loved it, and I was reminded of how much I loved The Wire, too.
via Gawker
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What should I read?
March 17, 2011 § 6 Comments
It’s quite embarrassing, I know, but I have to admit it: I haven’t read Anna Karenina or Crime and Punishment. That’s why I keep making lists of the most ‘notable’ books I should/must read, the so called Classics.
David McCandless, from the amazing website Information is Beautiful, has managed to gather information from more than 15 Top 100 Books polls and charts in order to create a “consensus cloud” of the most mentioned books titles across the world.
Check the data and analysis here.
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In literature / hidden haikus I have found / unexpectedly
February 22, 2011 § 5 Comments
Haiku finder is a simple yet impressive little web app that discovers hidden haiku patterns in any text you paste into its search box. I discovered it on BuzzFeed and I was soon copy-pasting a great part of Project Gutenberg on that clever little page. Here are some of my finds (granted, most of them are translations in english, but still):
Kafka’s Metamorphosis:
“Gregor!” shouted his
sister, glowering at him
and shaking her fist.
Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment:
Something was happening
to him entirely new,
sudden and unknown
Checkov’s Uncle Vanya:
I can still feel his
voice vibrating in the air;
it caresses me.
Shakespeare’s Alls Well That Ends Well:
The web of our life
is of a mingled yarn, good
and ill together.
Austen’s Pride and Prejudice:
If your feelings are
still what they were last April,
tell me so at once
Dickens’ Great Expectations:
“You ridiculous
boy,” said Estella, “will you
never take warning?”
cummings’ The Enormous Room:
It was a fine place,
a large city to be sure.
But always changing.
What’s impressive is how well these little haikus really summarize the whole essence of the works they were inconspicuously hiding in. What else is impressive is how haikus seem inherent in the rhythm of some authors’ writing: Austen and e.e.cummings yield up large numbers of haikus. Other authors have scarce or no haikus at all.
I’ll now go and search for haikus in the new iTunes terms and conditions.
The thread of hypertextuality
February 14, 2011 § 8 Comments
Hypertext has changed the way we consume information. Long gone is the linearity of printed narratives; we, web addicts, enjoy the content-hopping experience of following links ad infinitum.
It has been a paradigm shift. It has been central to postmodern literary theory. And now it finds its way back to the printed book.
Traumgedanken (Thoughts on dreams) is a book by information designer Maria Fischer. It is an anthology of literary, psychological, philosophical and scientific essays on dreams. But each topic, or content node, is connected to other instances of itself in the book by a colorful thread. By following the various threads you practically navigate the book in a hypertextual way, creating your own narratives.
I need to hold it in my hands, but it does look like a successful analog implementation of a digital concept. And, what’s more, it is really beautiful. I am impressed.
it's a small web 