piran café

I hate quotations. Tell me what you know.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, originally uploaded by George Eastman House.

Via Discover is this fabulous gallery of magnified grains of sand. From A Grain of Sand – Nature’s Secret Wonder, by Gary Greenberg, published last week.

Check it out. A nifty promo video is here.

I just finished reading Seven Days in the Art World by Sarah Thornton, a fabulous account of a microculture –the high-end modern art world– that 99% of us will never experience.

Those seven days are actually seven chapters, drawn on experiences over five years, a period during which, as Times critic Ben Lewis notes, “art grew from a £2.2 billion industry to a £6.1 billion one, and where prices for some artists’ work increased by factors of between 20 and 80.”

In some respects it’s a breezy travelogue –the book begins with an auction in New York, and spans the globe with stops at the Basel Art Fair, a studio visit to Takashi Murakami in Japan and the Venice Bienale– but also a nicely paced study of the quirky dealers, curators, critics, collectors and hypesters that make up and live in that multi-billion $$ world. Thornton is a trained sociologist but also a journalist, making the quips and quotes culled from hundreds of interviews part reportage and part borderline gossip, and historically relevant as well.

You won’t look at an over-hyped Hirst, or an over-priced piece by a modern artist you’ve never heard off, the same way again.

According to this post by Jake Tapper of ABC News, just after Venezuelan President Hugo Chavez gave Barack Obama a copy of Open Veins of Latin America: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent by Uruguayan author Eduardo Galeano yesterday, the book’s Amazon sales rank was 54,295.

Before I went to bed last night it hit No. 17; it’s now sitting pretty at No. 5.

Discussing his latest novel, Man in the Dark, Paul Auster tells The Guardian about the root of his frustrations in recent years.

If there is something getting Auster’s goat, it’s American politics. It was his disgust at the outcome of the 2000 US elections that sparked the story-within-a-story at the heart of Man in the Dark, about a counterfactual US where civil war reigns and New York leads a movement to form the Independent States of America.

“It’s a war of bullets and bombs, whereas the divisions in the US now are similar to a civil war, but we’re fighting it with words and ideas,” he says.

He can pinpoint the idea for his latest story to his “frustration and disgust after the 2000 elections … Gore won, Gore was elected president, and it was taken away from him by political and legal manoeuvering, and ever since then I’ve had this eerie feeling of being in some parallel world, some world we didn’t ask for but we nevertheless got.

More…

I started reading Istanbul: Memories and the City a few nights ago and found this of particular interest.

Over the past several weeks, Granta, my favorite litmag, has been republishing pieces written by the 12 Nobel laureates whose work has appeared in the magazine since its modern incarnation in 1979.

Among them is an interview with Orham Pamuk conducted on December 13, 2005, one year before he won the Nobel and three days before he infamously went on trial in Istanbul for ‘publicly denigrating Turkish identity’ when he told a Swiss journalist: “Thirty thousand Kurds have been killed here, and a million Armenians. And almost nobody dares to mention that. So I do.” The charges were later dropped on a technicality, but the hatred from the right at home –along with the occasional death threat– continued.

I need certain things to write with some pleasure and intensity. If we leave aside paper and fountain pen, tea and coffee, what I need most is a certain irresponsibility. It is essential for writing fiction, at least for me: I need a playful irresponsibility, to twist everything in life, to turn situations around, to look for childish irony in the gravest drama, to organize the subtle ambiguities from which fiction arises. But now, I’m expected to be clarifying, clarifying, clarifying my statements. This lost spirit of irresponsibility —this childish freedom— is what I’m hoping to gain back. Because the more this affair grows, the greater the social responsibility that I have to face, and it is suffocating.

And

I am grateful for the international attention, and the backing of the liberal-leftist intellectuals here. It definitely makes me protected. But on the other hand, I feel that I have to answer this attention. One feels obliged. And that affects your imagination. And slowly this responsibility may convert you into a political commentator, or an activist, or a person with strong ideas. I’m not like that and I don’t want to be a person who cares about ideas more than life.

He and interviewer Maureen Freely, who has translated most of his works, then go on a tour of Istanbul, revisiting the setting of his novel, The Black Book.

Intro is here, interview begins here.

photo via wikipedia

Friends and acquaintances often ask me to recommend guidebooks as they plan their first visits to Europe. I rarely do, suggesting they instead pick up some contemporary fiction from their selected destination. In many cases it’ll provide more specific insight than any single bulky travel guide, and it won’t become dated nearly as fast.

So, if you’re on your way to Germany any time soon, check this out: Sign and Sight has English excerpts from the six finalists for the German Book Prize 2008.

The short-listed half dozen apparently have absolutely nothing in common. Deutsche Welle reports:

Two of the finalist titles are books that paint a portrait of society in the crumbling German Democratic Republic: Uwe Teilkamp’s “Der Turm” and Ingo Schulze’s “Adam und Evelyn.”

In Dietmar Dath’s “Die Abschaffung der Arten” it’s the animals who talk and act after the world’s demise. In Sherko Fatah’s “Das dunkle Schiff,” a former jihadist flees to Germany from Iraq. With “Nach Hause schwimmen,” Rolf Lappert has delivered a coming-of-age story, while Iris Hanika’s “Treffen sich zwei” is the only love story among the finalists.

No word on when or whether they’ll be published in translation, but don’t let that hold you back. You can begin browsing some other possibilities here. Any recommendations?

Jim Rosenau of the This Into That Gallery in Berkeley, Calif., has come up with a sensational solution: he makes book shelves and bookcases, among other things, out of them.

Begin browsing the gallery here and admit it, you want each and every one, don’t you.

Good-Bye to all That: Partings is the theme for this month’s issue of Words Without Borders, a fitting way to say farewell to a calendar year by one of my favorite online lit mags.

Among the selections is a short piece, Under the Surface, by Slovenian writer Mojca Kumerdej, a gripping tale of one woman’s sacrifice to save her marriage. The story is from Kumerdej’s 2003 collection of short stories, Fragma, which WWB describes as “literary interrogations of sexuality and violence”. It’s unlike any family story I’ve ever read.

More about the book here, in Slovenian.

Part of the stash of stuff I had shipped here last October included what’s left of my modest collection of zines from the late 80s –you know, those photocopied political rags, lit mags, chapbooks and collections of rants you’d sometimes find in music shops next to the magazine racks. Or cluttering the floor underneath the record bins. The proliferation of cheap copy shops fueled the “industry”, and by the late Reagan years self-publishing was nearly as common as blogs are today. Relatively speaking.

They all carried a price tag –oftentimes scribbled on with heavy black marker as an afterthought prompted by wishful thinking– but usually they were all labors of love, produced on kitchen tables and cluttered desks with scissors, tape, and glue, before they were secretly copied on the office copier when the boss wasn’t looking. At least my favorites were.

Most of you probably know about Boing Boing, but you may not know that its beginnings are firmly rooted in the now forgotten annals of zinedom –here’s a pic of #2. I can’t imagine that too many still exist, so it was nice to find this one stuffed into my humble filing archive, an old Jugoslav Airlines flight bag my mom once threatened to throw away.

Besides Too Much Good Air (sorry, a copy didn’t make it across the Atlantic), a magazine a friend and I somehow kept alive for a couple of years in college, I had a short-lived zine of my own, Sir Realist, which I tried to market as an Utne Reader of the zine world, reprinting pieces and parts from other zines. Kind of like a blog, actually, except that it only lasted for three issues. And most copies walked out the few bookstores or record shops that agreed to give it shelf space without any sort of remuneration.

One of my favorites was something called Mallife, a work of art in and of itself. Scattered among its experimental adsurdist fiction were multi-page hand-glued inserts and drawings colored by hand. Another that stood out was S(C)RAP #6 with its black sandpaper cover. These (and many others) were serious enough to actually acquire ISSN numbers.

Here are scans of a few. I’ll scan/upload some more if there’s enough interest. Anyone know what any of these publishers/writers are up to these days?

Edited to add a few links of interest:

“ZineWiki is an open-source encyclopedia devoted to zines and independent media. It covers the history, production, distribution and culture of the small press”;

Zinebook.com is an online directory with plenty of links; and

In an effort to find a permanent home for these and the thousands of others that were created, I just set up a flickr group — http://www.flickr.com/groups/zine_repository/ — where you can easily add images of zines you’ve either published or those you might have in your personal collections. Note that the flickr group will only be for zines that are no longer being published.

For those whose moleskine obsessions are as insatiable as mine, good news: those nifty journal makers have introduced a City Notebook series to feed our habits.

Each of the 228 page notebooks feature up to 36 pages of zone maps, an alphabetical street index, along with a complete metro system diagram and full list of stops. There are tabbed sections for those who like to stay organized and removable sheets for all of us whoo refuse to tear out any paper from the ruggedly bound spine. And best of all, at just 9 x 14 cm (3 1/2 v 5 1/2″), they’ll fit wherever it is you like to keep them.

The first dozen issued are all European cities: Amsterdam, Barcelona, Berlin, Dublin, Lisbon, London, Madrid, Milan (I saw this one at a bookshop there last month), Paris, Prague, Rome, and Wien. U.S. destinations join the club in the Spring –Boston, New York, San Francisco and Washington DC– with Chicago, Los Angeles, Montreal and Seattle versions available in the fall.

Most appear to retail at $16.95 (13 EUR) at most online vendors.

BTW, here’s a pic of a lovely gift I rec’d from event organizers in Paris last July. Yup, it made my day.

(Thanks to Metroblogging Berlin for this reminder.)

After years of scribbling notes into haphazard notebooks, steno pads and other such gup, I decided last week that it was time to break down and begin using real journals. Judging from this piece in today’s Tacoma, Washington News Tribune, I’m hardly alone.

These timelessly classy blank books have always caught my attention at book stores and stationery shops, but whenever I bought one, it was always as a gift for someone else. (I hope they’re being used.) That changed in Nijmegen, Netherlands a little over a week ago, when I stepped into an elegantly cramped bookshop to innocently escape the afternoon mist and chill, and where I walked out with my first moleskine (mol-a-skeen’-a) notebook, joining, in my mind, a mythical brotherhood with Van Gogh, Mattise, Hemingway and Chatwin.

(This wasn’t actually my first moleskine; deciding I wanted to breathe life into the dying art of postcard writing, I bought a small tabbed address book version last December, in which I carefully entered the most meaningful addresses from my past and present that I could collect. It was an important first step, and I can’t remember the last time my handwriting was so legible.)

The travel writer Bruce Chatwin’s obsession with moleskines has been well-documented elsewhere. He would buy them by the hundred before embarking on a journey, and famously said of his journals: “To lose a passport was the least of one’s worries: to lose a notebook was a catastrophe.” [A moleskine website has a brief entry from one of Chatwin's moleskine entries written during the writer's extended stay in Australia while writing his modern classic, The Songlines.]

The decision to buy my own moleskine actually came a few days earlier, on an early morning train ride from Ljubljana to Klagenfurt through another dreamy mist. A slight delay allowed enough time to finish Oracle Night, Paul Auster’s delightfully noir parable on time. An enthralling work, the novel takes place over the course of nine days in which a writer’s life turns inside out after he buys a mysterious little blue Portuguese-made notebook. Most of the novel is actually set in the notebook, which for a time becomes such a dizzying jungle of activity for the protagonist –and for the reader– that he’s forced to resort to footnotes. [Here's a blurb from a Paris Review interview with Auster's comments about notebooks.]

Mine isn’t blue; it’s a semi-glossed black, stylishly minimalist, but it’s not blank in the purest sense of the word. I chose the ruled line version, simply because sometimes I need guidance. The absolutely blank book, I decided, was too big a first leap. I’ve glanced at it several times a day since returning home, sitting there on a largely empty shelf where I envision it being joined by dozens more.

But I have yet to put black ink pen to acid-free paper. I’m not too worried about that, actually. As with the pair of 1990 Bordeauxs I’m still clinging onto, the right moment will come. In the meantime, I’ve carefully selected items to place in the book’s accordion folder: a 20 euro bill, just in case; a photocopy of passport info; a few small photos; and some loose paper to avoid, at all costs, tearing a sheet from its ruggedly-bound spine.

While reading the News Tribune piece on Moleskiners, I found others who share what I should now finally, readily and unequivocally admit is an obsession with stationery. (While typing this, I just realized that I’ve been collecting stationery and letterhead from various hotels in which I’ve stayed, paper that I’ve never used and most likely never will.)

A nice start is papersnobbery, a newish blog that is subtitled as, appropriately enough, “an obsession with stationery.”