To celebrate 30 years of the Diagram Prize for Oddest Book Title of the Year, the public is invited to participate in the “Diagram of Diagrams,” a vote to choose the very oddest title from among all the previous winners.
For my money, some of the strongest contenders include The Theory of Lengthwise Rolling (1983), the 1995 eco-classic Reusing Old Graves, 2005’s late-to-the-Sixth Sense-party People Who Don’t Know They’re Dead: How They Attach Themselves to Unsuspecting Bystanders and What to Do About It, and, my personal favorite, 2002’s Living With Crazy Buttocks.
You can read the whole list (and cast your vote) here.
Tags: weird titles, internet polls, crazy buttocks
Indie publisher Dzanc Books is looking for unpaid interns in the following areas:
Click here to learn more about the program and how to apply.
Tags: break in to publishing, dzanc, will work for books
For those of you who are Balkan-ly inclined, check out my good friend Damir’s auspicious debut in the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal Europe.
Tags: opinionation, wsj, sweet cred
*I’m back in America.
*I’m going to be a writer-in-residence at the Robert M. MacNamara Foundation this fall.
*An essay I wrote on the recent FISA legislation will be up on Thursday at Doublethink. [Edit: you can now read it here.]
*Vrapple is, in fact, delicious.
Tags: homecoming, goings-on, vrapple’s return
I’ve been hardcore heimwehkrank this past week, but I’m not sure why. Berlin’s been straight-up lovely: warm and breezy, with blossoming trees, platzes crammed full of romping kids and rowdy dogs, people strolling along licking ice cream cones or sitting out on cafe terraces sipping milchcafes or beers… yet all I keep thinking about is home–the mountains, the sky, the particular smell of the morning air in New England in springtime.
New England, though, is my adopted home; originally, I’m from Philly, a place I have much less of a connection to spiritually, but much more of a connection with culturally. Only other native eastern Pennsylvanians can relate to my occasional longings for TastyKakes, a really good hoagie roll, fresh hot Philly soft pretzels (which are–and I speak from experience here–far far better than the German Brezn from whence they came), and, most inexplicable of all to non-natives, scrapple.
Scrapple is, despite what people unfamiliar with its delights will try to tell you (”Do you know what it’s made of?”), a true food of the gods. Oh, those delicious crispy-peppery wafers–an unassailable argument in favor of the consumption of offal, and one of the few meat products that still makes my mouth water. But for a long-time vegetarian, thinking about meat and eating it are two entirely different things. I’m not ethically veg, and I’ve tried meat here and there over the years, but frankly, the texture and tongue-coating greasiness of formerly-living food is more off-putting than the taste is pleasing (yup: even when it comes to fried pork).
In any case, when I read this morning about Vrapple, I was filled first with astonished elation (Veggie scrapple?? Can it be true??), then hit with an extra-strong wave of homesickness of the i-miss-my-childhood-bedroom variety.
I’ve alerted my local sources of its existence and demanded that it be promptly sampled. If it’s even half as good as the real deal, I’ll be carrying home a suitcase full of fake scrapple the next time I visit the fam.
As for the homesickness: two months and counting. And then, nestled back in my little mountain home, I’ll get to start missing Berlin!
Tags: scrapple, vrapple, heimwehkrank
According to this essay in The Guardian, the nation of France is “currently preoccupied with the fate of its ailing semicolon.” For those of you still blissfully unaware of this minefield of controversy–upon which hinges the future of all discourse–here’s a taste of the shocking revelations contained in Jon Henley’s intrepid piece:
[Subeditor and author Sylvie] Prioul says she recently pored over an entire edition of L’Humanité, France’s once-great Communist daily, without finding a single instance of a semicolon, except in a particularly finely turned editorial.
I’m certain that I should be recoiling in horror at such examples of the troglodytic state of language and its attendant punctuation. But, uh, I’m not.
Tags: punctuation, dubious controversy, semicolon’s last hurrah
I’ve got a minute or two before the next guests arrive, so here’s a selection of items of writerly interest that have been mouldering in my drafts folder, becoming less relevant by the hour.
Reviews/Excerpts:
- Sexual Healing: Tom Bissel’s hilariously negative review of Scott Spencer’s new novel Willing somehow makes you want to read the book.
- An unsanitised history of washing: This little teaser for Katherine Ashenburg’s new book Clean: An Unsanitised History of Washing is the kind of light socio-cultural history that unfailingly catches my interest. Bonus: this particular excerpt contains one of the hottest lines I’ve ever read, from a love letter from Napoleon to Josephine (“I will return to Paris tomorrow evening. Don’t wash.”).
- Is there an original voice in there?: The Guardian continues to earn my contempt with this meatheaded take on the just-published UK hardcover edition of Amy Hempel’s The Dog of the Marriage (abounding with wtfs like “[f]irst-person writing can be a tremendous liberation, particularly perhaps for women”).
Interviews:
- “When I run I am in a peaceful place”: Der Spiegel interviews Haruki Murakami about the new German translation of his memoir about running and the kinship between marathons and novels (verdict after reading: he is a seriously tripped-out dude).
- Cover Girl: Interesting Q & A with Graham Rawle, the genuis/madman behind Woman’s World, a novel created entirely out of fragments of text from women’s magazines (here’s an excerpt, from the author’s web site).
Miscellany:
- Rushdie redux?: Danish Caricaturist of Muhammad Fame Now Homeless (”Westergaard was forced to leave his actual residence in November after the Danish security and intelligence agency, PET, informed him of a ‘concrete’ plan to murder him”)
- Hemingway too square for Lucky Strike’s image: Battle ahead for ‘cigarette pack’ books (”[M]embers of the public are unlikely to mistake a Hemingway novel for a packet of cigarettes.”)
- Sci-Fi’s Death Knell?: Virtuality and reality ‘to merge’ (”Computers the size of blood cells will create fully immersive virtual realities by 2033, leading inventor Ray Kurzweil has predicted.” There’s really nowhere for the Phillip K. Dicks of the world to go from there, is there?)
Last but not least: Shout out to Matthew Dickman, who I had the pleasure of meeting (and cutting a rug with) at Bread Loaf back in ‘04. He just won the 2008 Honickman First Book Prize in Poetry!
Tags: lit news roundup, link-o-rama, odds-n-ends
Now that the winteriest bits are behind us, ’tis the season for various friends and family members to pilgrimage to Berlin to sleep on our futon, binge on kebap, and saufen wie ein Bürstenbinder.
Last week was visitor #1; we’ve got 3 more to go before mid-April. Between now and then, updates will be intermittent (and probably focused more on the delights of the city in springtime than on literary happenings).
Tags: life, springtime, blog neglect
Typographica rounds up their 25 favorite typefaces of 2007. Prepare to drool.
Tags: typefaces, design, font fetishist
Apparently big bad Swedish Ikea has, for decades, been using its product names to insult its underdog neighbor to the south. From Der Spiegel:
Two Danish academics, Klaus Kjöller of the University of Copenhagen and Tröls Mylenberg of the University of Southern Denmark, conducted a thorough analysis of the names used in the Ikea catalog. They concluded that the Swedish names are reserved for the “better” products, and that even Norwegian names manage to make it into the bed department. But the “lesser” products bear Danish names like “Roskilde” and “Köge.”
“Doormats and runners, as well as inexpensive wall-to-wall carpeting are third-class, if not seventh-class, items when it comes to home furnishings,” Kjöller is quoted as saying in Nyhedsavisen, a Danish free paper. The stuff that goes on the floor, Kjöller said, is about as low as it gets. He accused the home furnishings company of “Swedish imperialism.”
(American readers, I know what you’re thinking: Huh? Those nonsensical words on the Ikea boxes are names? And they actually mean something? Well, yes they do. In fact, according to my Swedish sources, they’re often cute/clever references to the product’s style or function. For example, “Smaka,” the name of a cheese grater, means “taste.”)
The rest of the article is worth the click, if not for the brief primer outlining the historical basis for the Danes’ ire, then for the hilariously impotent revenge scheme they’re considering. The whole thing reads like some kind of Vonnegutian theater of the absurd.
Tags: Ikea is a monster, international rivalries, death by a thousand doormats
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