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We need to bring back children’s programming that focuses on reading. I’m so serious
WE NEED THEM BACK ‼️‼️‼️
Quiet place to read #50
ebookporn reblogged
Illustration of the Sun and solar flares from Marvels of the Universe v.1.
Full text here.
This is a spectacular book with fantastic illustrations, well worth the browsing. Collections of magazines like Marvels of the Universe as well as old encyclopedias can be a wealth of inspiration for writers, particulalry writers of science fiction and fantasy. They also capture the wonder and yes - marvel of our planet. Click the link and spent a minute flipping through the pages. You will soon find yourslef lost in a strange and wonderful world.
“The relationship between a sentence and a related image should be thought of as one of translation.”
You've heard that an image is worth a thousand words, but I object to this formulation. How insidiously the market creeps into our metaphors! Words and images can't be valued nor measured - they are not currency. Instead, I think of text and image as different languages, and the relationship between a sentence and a related image should be thought of as one of translation.
Source: lithub.com
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The theme of this issue of "Youth" magazine is comics. I have drawn a sticker cover, which can be collaged by the readers themselves. Much thanks to AD Tian Ke.
“Our Latin American literature has always been a committed, a responsible literature,” explained Guatemalan novelist Miguel Ángel Asturias in 1973.
The great works of our countries have been written in response to a vital need, a need of the people, and therefore almost all our literature is committed. Only as an exception do some of our writers isolate themselves and become uninterested in what is happening around them; such writers are concerned with psychological or egocentric subjects and the problems of a personality out of contact with surrounding reality.1
It is the bourgeois writers, he wants to say here, who ignore the looting of their resources by the rich behemoth to the north, which then turns around and redeploys those riches on death squads and dictators. It is no surprise, then, that Asturias’s landmark novel, Mr. President, confronts its readers with similar frankness. Mr. President examines widespread corruption around a fictional Guatemalan dictator. But its 1946 debut reflected a delay of more than a decade by the country’s real dictators, who disrupted the novel’s genesis and sent its author into exile. And in this act of suppression, Asturias’s censors and exilers were aided by the US, specifically the CIA.
Science Fiction From Latin America, With Zombie Dissidents and Aliens in the Amazon
A new wave of writers is making the genre its own, rooting it in local homelands and histories.
By Emily Hart
A spaceship lands near a small town in the Amazon, leaving the local government to manage an alien invasion. Dissidents who disappeared during a military dictatorship return years later as zombies. Bodies suddenly begin to fuse upon physical contact, forcing Colombians to navigate newly dangerous salsa bars and FARC guerrillas who have merged with tropical birds.
Across Latin America, shelves labeled “ciencia ficción,” or science fiction, have long been filled with translations of H.P. Lovecraft, Ray Bradbury, William Gibson and H.G. Wells. Now they might have to compete with a new wave of Latin American writers who are making the genre their own, rerooting it in their homelands and histories. Shrugging off rolling cornfields and New York skylines, they set their stories against the dense Amazon, craggy Andean mountainscapes and unmistakably Latin American urban sprawl.
The avalanche of original science fiction is timely, arriving as many readers and writers in Latin America feel choked by the folksy tropes of magical realism and desensitized by realist depictions of the region’s struggles with violence.
José Donoso Saw the Future of Latin American Literature
by Zachary Issenberg
The Boom in Spanish American Literature: A Personal History is Donoso’s chronicle of this multi-generational, multi-cultural revolution of language from one of its earliest advocates and oldest mentors. Throughout this slim, warm memoir, Donoso performs two great tasks: to convince you that the Boom never existed for writers, but that only writers could have produced it. Donoso lays out this paradox in the book’s final pages:
[T]he question of the constitution of the Boom, of who does and who does not belong…. is naïve and false, as false as the notion of stagnation in human and political relations, as false as the idea of perpetual unanimity of opinions… [T]he [Boom] seen from the outside, and the reasons for inclusion or exclusion… are more than anything mirages seen by those who are excluded and who want to belong.
Source: themillions.com
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“The Importance of being Frank”, Alan Moore on Frank Miller, The Daredevils (UK) #1, 1981
This is a great piece from a legend on a legend.
I found some old Terror Tracks CD ROMs (audio choose your own adventures) from my days at TSR in the 90s. These were quaint attempts at innovating new storytelling formats. I soon realized for all its new technological innovation in the day, I had no device to play the damned discs in my home and that the only way to listen to them was in the old car. Today the challenges faced by libraries and archives to collect and preserve our digital-only culture are real and ever growing. Many digital formats are already inaccessible – webpages, floppy disks, even smartphone apps that are no longer supported. Can libraries and archives store a WebToon as a PDF? Should they? So many questions... but this is a great interview to get a sense of the issues.
"There are a lot of digital publications that are published in a more standardised format that we know we can collect at scale. But there are a lot more publications, which sometimes can be interpreted as games or sometimes are defined as electronic literature, that are all part of the current UK publishing landscape. They’re very much things that we want to preserve for future generations." ~ Giulia Carla Rossi, Digital curator and British Library’s head of digital publications
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An extraordinary collection of fine and rare miniature books, published from the mid-17th-century to the modern day. It includes books printed in France, the Netherlands, England, Italy and Germany, on a diversity of themes ranging from histories to works of scripture, devotion, literature, almanacs, and natural history. The collection boasts three 17th-century works, with the earliest being a Dutch song book from 1650 preserved in a charming contemporary vellum wallet binding, as well as a French book of hours from 1684 and an English bible in contemporary morocco from 1693. Many of the books are attractively bound in contemporary gilt morocco, others in gilt and blindstamped calf, decorative paper wrappers, silver cases, while some are contained within miniature wooden boxes as part of a child’s sewing kit. Some books are housed in cases with their own miniature magnifying glasses, and others are arranged on miniature shelves or cabinets, including a miniature revolving bookcase constructed by Julian Stanley of High Wycombe, commissioned by Lord Wardington and presented by him to Nanni Israel.
Christie’s
Finally, a library my wife says I have room for...
How Spotify Is Taking Crumbs From Quietus Artists’ Tables
How the new streaming royalties system where a threshold of 1000 plays has to be reached before money is paid out, is an unprincipled devaluation of the music we all hold dear
by Eamonn Forde
The saloon doors burst open and the piano player stops dead. The frontiersmen look up from their drinks. The first thing they see is the oversized hat. Glaringly white in the sun. “There’s a new sheriff in this town," growls the stranger as he grabs the piano player by the throat. “I am here to clean it up."
Except this “new" sheriff is the old sheriff in a slightly different hat. The largest of all the sheriffs. And he is not cleaning up the town for everyone. He’s primarily cleaning up the town for himself. That’s how (lawyers, please note) an entirely fictional and highly satirical screenplay could possibly open to explain what Universal Music Group (UMG) is planning around the piano-playing Spotify.
What has happened is this. Back in September, UMG announced it was working with Deezer, one of the smaller subscription services with around 10 million subscribers globally, to change how streaming royalties are paid out. Starting in October in France, this was originally intended as a trial run and a proof of concept for a whole new way to share out streaming income.
Source: thequietus.com
In the market for a new ereader. My trusty Sony PRS 700 is in need of a new battery and may be about to give up the ghosts. Starting to really look at color ereaders. This one has some nice features.
‘No one else is saving it’: the fight to protect a historic music collection
The ARChive of Contemporary Music, which houses more than 90m songs and is supported by names such as Martin Scorsese, is in need of a new home
by David Smith
It all started in a loft in Tribeca, New York, long before it was a trendy neighbourhood. “I had 47,000 records and nobody wanted them,” recalls Bob George, who had just published a discography of punk and new wave music. “That led a lot of people coming to me and saying you have to save this stuff; no one else is saving it. That got the ball rolling in my loft in what is now fashionable Tribeca, which was an incredibly unfashionable war zone in 1974 when I was first there.”
George turned his record collection into the ARChive of Contemporary Music (Arc) in 1985 with co-founder David Wheeler. The non-profit music library and research centre now contains more than 3m sound recordings or over 90m songs, making it one of the biggest popular music collections in the world. Donors and board members have included David Bowie, Jonathan Demme, Lou Reed, Martin Scorsese and Paul Simon.
The Arc is not open to the public but has been a vital resource for film-makers, writers and researchers ranging from Ken Burns looking for a song for his series Baseball to the new Grammy Hall of Fame and Museum in Los Angeles needing cover art for its inducted recordings. Now, however, this unique treasure trove is under existential threat.
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reading glasses