Wake in Recording

 books  Comments Off
May 302011
 

While we’re on the subject of Finnegan’s Wake, here’s a very melodic recording of James Joyce himself reading the finishing paragraphs of the book’s first part from 1924.


 
… Can’t hear with the waters of. The chittering waters of. Flittering bats, fieldmice bawk talk. Ho! Are you not gone ahome? What Thom Malone? Can’t hear with bawk of bats, all thim liffeying waters of. Ho, talk save us! My foos won’t moos. I feel as old as yonder elm. A tale told of Shaun or Shem? All Livia’s daughtersons. Dark hawks hear us. Night! Night! My ho head halls. I feel as heavy as yonder stone. Tell me of John or Shaun? Who were Shem and Shaun the living sons or daughters of? Night now! Tell me, tell me, tell me, elm! Night night! Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hitherandthithering waters of. Night!

Wake in Progress

 books  Comments Off
May 292011
 

Wake in Progress documents the mesmerising beauty of one passionate person’s quixotic attempt at illustrating Finnegan’s Wake, James Joyce’s experimental masterpiece of some eight hundred pages.

rivverun

The website must be one of the most incredible  and beautiful things I have ever seen!

capricorn

And since the novel’s closing sentence is one of my personal favourites, I’ll include it as well:

A way a lone a last a loved a long the

awayalone

Perhaps its magic lies in its sense of infinitude. And how beautifully the illustration with the underlain map captures it!

Thank you, Mr. Crowe, for your brilliant and devoted effort!

Rereading Alice

 books, visual arts  2 Responses »
May 292011
 

Lewis Caroll’s Alice in Wonderland begins with this marvellous question:

Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her sister on the bank, and of having nothing to do: once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was reading, but it had no pictures or conversations in it, “and what is the use of a book,” thought Alice, “without pictures or conversations?”

What use indeed! That’s something to ponder on! But as my train of thought travels deep into the nonsensical void, the view the windows offer is wondrous! Want to see?

It’s Alice in Tumblrland!

Some of my favourite Alices are missing though. Must have followed the wrong rabbit. Here’s Iassen Ghiuselev’s Alice:

Ghiuselev

And Alan Moore’s and Melinda Gebbie’s Alice, who didn’t make it either:

Moore

So Alice got up and ran off, thinking while she ran, as well as she might, what a wonderful dream it had been.

Sobotna matineja Miljenka Jergovića

 books  Comments Off
May 282011
 

V času pomladanskih počitnic mi je v roke prišla ena posebej debela, praznična številka zagrebškega Jutarnjega lista. Večinoma v podobnih situacijah le radovedno preletim naslove, tokrat pa sem na koncu počitnic eno stran odnesel domov.
Miljenko Jergović je v svoji kolumni opisal nedavni obisk v beograjskem gledališču Atelje 212, kjer si je ogledal predstavo Otac na službenom putu.
V članku se omenja en stari film, omenja se ena preteklost, ki je več ni. Omenja se Vlastimir Đuza Stojiljković, ki se ga starejši mogoče še spomnite iz televizijske nadaljevanke Pozorište u kući.
Omenja se trenutek, v katerem se smeh spremeni v tiho pričevanje čarovniji.
Članek je napisan v hrvaščini. Opravičujem se vsem, ki tega ne razumejo. V primeru, da bi kdo izvedel za slovenski prevod, bom vesel linka.

Books and bookshelves

 books  Comments Off
May 282011
 

I don’t know.. I am still trying to understand what’s the trick, what microblogging really stands for, what is the meaning behind all this borrowed images, literary fragments, random diary entries..

I do remember that a long time ago I really believed in simplicity and short form. Later somehow I got persuaded that short form is something very difficult to achieve. That you need a lot of hard work and experience before maybe one day you are ready to fabricate a decent piece. I guess it is time to get rid of presumptions.

Thinking again, this microblogging might have some qualities of a borrowed dream. In this case into the world of books and buildings.

And here again (thanks to Menza Pri Koritu who kindly shared this link on our Facebook wall) into the world of bookshelves.

 Posted by at 11:47 am

Kertész On Reading

 books  Comments Off
May 272011
 

A couple of years ago, the Guardian website featured some beautiful photographs of people reading taken by the celebrated Hungarian photographer André Kertész. The pictures were taken in a period of over fifty years and were included in the photographer’s seminal work On Reading.

Kertesz, 1972

The intimacy of these solitary portraits brings to my mind a beautiful poem by Wallace Stevens celebrating the delicate relationship between a book and its reader.

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night
Was like the conscious being of the book.
The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,
Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom the book is true, to whom
The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be.
The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.
And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world,
In which there is no other meaning, itself
Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.

Virginia Woolf on Words

 books  Comments Off
May 262011
 

Here is a recording of Virginia Woolf’s contribution to the BBC broadcast series entitled Words Fail Me from 1937. It is, supposedly, the only surviving recording of her voice.

“[Words] are the wildest, freest, most irresponsible, most un-teachable of all things. Of course, you can catch them and sort them and place them in alphabetical order in dictionaries. But words do not live in dictionaries; they live in the mind.”

It is the kindness more than the ingeniousness of her reflection that I find the most striking.

Kafka’s A Country Doctor

 art, books  Comments Off
May 242011
 

I was in a quandary: my presence was urgently required; a gravely ill man was waiting for me in a village ten miles distant; a blizzard filled the space between me and my goal; I had a carriage, light, high-wheeled, eminently suited to our country roads; wrapped in my fur, with my Gladstone bag in my hand, I stood in the courtyard all ready to go; but the horse was missing, there was no horse.

(Franz Kafka, A Country Doctor)

So begins one of Kafka’s most enigmatic short stories. It is a nebulous tale of a country doctor summoned, on a mischievous night, to perform his duty only to find himself immersed in absurd setbacks. In 2007, the Japanese anime master Koji Yamamura released a remarkably beautiful adapatation of this masterpiece.

A Country Doctor

With the use of peculiar and ingenious distortion effects, visual and vocal, Yamamura created a masterpiece of his own. For all friends of Kafka, animated film, or of curious beauty in general!

The fear of failure

 psychology, visual arts  Comments Off
May 222011
 

In a couple of days an interesting exhibition opens at the Berghs School of Communication in Stockholm, Sweden (so, if you happen to be in the nieghbourhood, don’t miss).

The subject matter is the fear of failure. As part of the project established creators speak about their fear. Maria Popova on Brainpickings highlighted and embedded her selection of these videos. More can be found on the exhibition site or on Vimeo. Embrace your fear!

Shel Silverstein in Motion

 books  Comments Off
May 212011
 

Tiny bits of Shel Silverstein’s most beloved works can be seen in animated form on his official website. His simple line drawings are vehicles of wonder for children of all ages. I particularly like this one:

The song is performed by Shel Silverstein himself. What curious imagination! We have his beautiful The Giving Tree in the bookshop.

Making of Tree of Codes

 books, curiousities  Comments Off
May 192011
 

First half of this video reminds me of either Metropolis or first Alien movie. In the second half one can see how demanding it is to manufacture a book. Surprisingly lot of hands, touching, turning, weighing. Now I understand why I have to wait so long for the book to be delivered each time I place my order.

David Foster Wallace’s Commencement Address

 books  Comments Off
May 182011
 

We have The Pale King (recently published unfinished novel by late David Foster Wallace) in stock in a large paperback format for something like 18.00 euros. End my add here.

“..There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”..”

It was end of May, David Foster Wallace gave a speech to college graduates.

I think I learned about it from Kottke where he links to this raw transcript which is the best version I found on net. It also came out in a book form. And this we always keep in stock. As a matter of fact, if you stand in front of our window and look at the books on display, “This is Water” is right now in the upper left corner. White cover small size hardcover.

And couple days ago, I flew through some old bookmarks, and I run into this nice thing at The Millions where he tries to get and collect responses from the witnessing graduates. It’s OK or so so, but the key thing and the reason why I am writing this is that in comments there are links to YouTube audio recordings (which I heard today for the first time). It is in two parts: part 1 and part 2.

 

Freeman Dyson on Information by James Gleick

 books  Comments Off
May 152011
 

I just kind of reread through Freeman Dyson’s review of Information, a new book by James Gleick. It ends with Borges and The Library of Babel and hope that “As finite creatures who think and feel, we can create islands of meaning in the sea of information.” Can we?

Here is also a link to an article by Gleick that according to Dyson was too late to be included into the book. And here is a link to James Gleick blog.

Funny little autobiographical note on the subject: I fondly remember his previous book Chaos. While still reading it I had to somehow see those fractals he was describing. I had no computer of my own and even if I had one it would not be powerful enough to show me anything. I was lucky I had a mathematician friend who worked at a research center on the outskirts of Prague. I remember traveling across the whole town to see Mandelbrot’s fractals in several magnification steps. Now fast forward couple years and here is Kottke who linked to this video of incredibly deep fractal set. Time flies.

We have Information in large format paperback format for something like 19.00 euros. It is due in small paperback in Spring 2012.

Great food series from Penguin

 publishers  Comments Off
May 092011
 

Penguin has published a new series of small paperbacks about food, cooking, chefs and other kitchen necessities. They say the series is similar to Great Ideas series which I respect and stock on our shelves.

The catch is that I do not know much about cooking. I love cooking (and I am pretty sure that Garfield would love my lasagna) but I don’t know much about cookbooks. From our conversations here at the bookshop I know that many of you, our readers are very knowledgeable in the field. Would you like to check what Penguin has cooked this time and let the rest of us know your opinion which from Great Food series are worth ordering? Thank you!