Didn’t you know that books dance at night? They dance and play and visit their friends!
Created by Sean and Lisa Ohlenkamp for Type Books in Toronto. Music by Grayson Matthews.
I remember a book collector from Carlos Maria Dominguez’s House of Paper who was very careful not to put books that wouldn’t like each other side by side on a shelf. How fantastic, I thought, to show such consideration and kindness. The things books let us be!
Discovery made thanks once again to Colossal.
I stumbled upon a touching moment this weekend in Roger Scruton’s 2009 documentary Why Beauty Matters. Towards the end of the film a group of musicians performs Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater at a train station. To a place of hurry and perfunctoriness, Beauty entered like a strange visitor from another world. It made people stop. Not in curiosity, but in awe. Something similar happened to me last winter in Madrid. A group of musicians stood in front of El Corte Inglés (the biggest department store chain in Spain) and played Ave Maria from Schubert’s Ellens dritter Gesang. It was unexpected. It was mesmerising. Of course I only captured it in memory. Someone managed to capture the same group on film though, it seems. I was happy to find it. They perform there regularly, I hear. In this video they peform O mio babbino caro from Puccini’s opera Gianni Schicchi. It does not compare to hearing them randomly as you wander the big city streets alone, but it does make one wonder … Where does beauty come from? Why does it matter?
Have a great start of the week!
In the spirit of www widening our palette of possibilities …
Thanks to Colossal.
Guardian asked authors about some of their favourite new titles this year. It would seem it has been a good year. Nice to see some less talked-about newcomers appear on the list as well, like Chavs by Owen Jones. Eric Hobsbawm’s choice, incidentally.
Which have you enjoyed most this year?
A tiny, short and beautiful film based on Danilo Kis’ novel A Tomb for Boris Davidovich. Narrated by Miki Manojlovic, directed by Aleksandar Kostic, illustrations by Dragana Vucetic.
On the shelves of the legendary Paris bookshop Shakespeare and Company books come to life at night. Spike Jonze has something to do with it. It isn’t a dream. It’s his most recent project.
Andrew Kolb’s illustrated Space Oddity now spiced up in animated motion by Andrew Ruttan.
To make the wait for your copy of 1Q84 a bit easier, here’s an article-interview with Murakami for the Guardian by Emma Brockes. Quite interesting!
All around him his friends rebelled, too. Some killed themselves, something Murakami often writes about. “They are gone,” he says. “It was a very chaotic time, and I’m still missing them. So sometimes I feel very strange to become 63 years old. I feel myself as a kind of survivor. Every time I think about them, I have some feeling that I have to live, I have to live very strong. Because I don’t want to spend years of my life… it should be the very purpose, life. Because I survived, I have obligations to give fully. So, every time I write my fiction, from time to time I think of the deceased. Friends.”
Consistency is all. “I like to read books. I like to listen to music. I collect records. And cats. I don’t have any cats right now. But if I’m taking a walk and I see a cat, I’m happy.”
To promote his new book, formerly Google’s now Facebook’s creative director Ji Lee created this visually delightful video, in which the relationship between the signifier and the signified becomes a bit less arbitrary.
Via the Casual Optimist.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary of the publication of Joseph Heller’s groundbreaking novel Catch 22, Kevin Power wrote an interesting article for the Irish Times on the timeless effect of Hellerian humour and its widespread influence. The Simpsons are mentioned.
In retrospect, Joseph Heller appears to have schooled us in a style of humour that we now take for granted: absurdist, brash, hyperintelligent, rooted in despair.
In Heller’s hands, the conceit has a savage elegance, and the book’s tangled narrative unfurls in gorgeously modulated prose, in which even the simplest sentences end with the snap of sharp teeth.
Heller was neither the only one nor the first to use this kind of humour. The absurd goes way back. It certainly reaches a climax with him though. Why? Because he armed himself with non-sense to make sense of the most non-sensical things of all, war. And he dared to fail.
Morale was deteriorating and it was all Yossarian’s fault. The country was in peril; he was jeopardizing his traditional rights of freedom and independence by daring to exercise them.
Hellerious, right?
Blu on Greece and Argentina
Blu has miles to say.
He couldn’t have put it better.
Via Arrested Motion.