Adrian Tomine covers Thomas Pynchon.
Via Drawn & Quarterly.
(Reblog from earlier today wasn’t showing up on my blog, so I’m reposting here.)
Source: bigredrobot
“Pan Macmillan’s Don DeLillo book series, published by Picador in 2011, has won a Yellow Pencil for Book Front Covers design at the D&AD Awards held this week. The Don DeLillo series covers were designed by illustrator Noma Bar at Dutch Uncle, London, with art direction by It’s Nice That and INT Works.” (via)
Source: twiststreet
“U is for Undertow”, by Sue Grafton
She waltzed into my frame and livened things up. I took another shot a second later but things were too quiet without her.
Source: unypl
The interior of Wade Davis’ office, National Geographic’s “Explorer in Residence.” The space was designed by architect Travis Price in Davis’ Georgetown studio.
(via Boing Boing)
So impractical. So gorgeous.
Source: Boing Boing
My Culture Roundup of 2011
Films seen in the cinema: 24
Films seen at home (TV/DVD/streaming): 86
Albums bought/downloaded: 91
Books read: 18 (Now that’s just awful! Must read more this year.)
We built pyramids of waste above and below the earth. The more hazardous the waste, the deeper we tried to sink it. The word plutonium comes from Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld.
Underworld, page 106
The narrator here is Nick Shay, a waste management worker who is overseeing the burial of nuclear waste left over from the Cold War deep in the earth.
It occurred to me that Borges would have been thrilled and horrified in equal measure by the Kindle. In fact, in a weird way, he sort of invented it (in the same way that Leonardo “invented” the helicopter and various other gadgets).
And so alas for America’s intelligentsia, who have Forgotten How To Love. And to such a foolish purpose!– they apparently want everyone to know how hip they are, and how nothing is good enough for them. Well, fine, okay, nothing is good enough for them. So what? The sole result of that is a twisted form of repression that they themselves hate, along with everything else they hate.
Because of nothing is good enough to enjoy freely, then pleasure itself is verbotten. This is a super-no-fun policy, so it’s no surprise that no hipster wants to be called a hipster. Even though one of the great tenets of hipsterism is a studied repudiation of repression (because repression most often means sexual repression, or teetotalling and hipsters want no part of that stuff,) hipsterism turns out to be the most stultifying intellectual position there is; and the most-hip hipsters, like the staff at Gawker, find themselves obliged to forbid themselves to enjoy, appreciate, or believe anything whatsoever.
Source: blog.totalcinema.com
A book is an arrangement of twenty-six phonetic symbols, ten numerals, and about eight punctuation marks, and people can cast their eyes over these and envision the eruption of Mount Vesuvius or the Battle of Waterloo.
Kurt Vonnegut.
I was introduced to this quote by my girlfriend. I think it’s a wonderful description of the power of literature.
