What's Neat on the Net VI

Happy Easter and April Fools. Here's what's neat on the net recently:

1. Featherproof Books offers free mini-books. You print them out, you fold them as directed, you staple them, and you have mini-books. With titles like The Karaoke Singer's Guide to Self-Defense (by Tim Kinsella) and The Miniature version of The Universe in Miniature in Miniature (by Patrick Somerville), how can you go wrong?

2. Flavorwire has photos of authors as teenagers, including Hemingway, Beckett, Atwood, Sendak, Karr (Mary), Salinger, Nin, and more. Oddly, fewer of them seem to have gone through that awkward stage (or were photographed in the awkward stage) than I would have imagined. They certainly don't look like social outsiders (well, maybe Gaiman and O'Connor do, and Ginsberg, but Toni Morrison is a knockout) ... Enjoy!

3. Open Culture has compiled a list of 500 free audiobooks for download. Some of them are through iTunes (including Jane Austen and Stephen Crane), and some are from Audible.com (Robert Louis Stevenson and George Eliot), and others are free MP3 and zipfile downloads at sundry sites (Miranda July, David Foster Wallace, and Jamaica Kincaid). Scroll to the bottom of the page for a list of other sites that offer free audiobooks, including Librivox, an organization putting public domain works online in audio form (you can volunteer to be a reader for them too), and Lit2Go, the University of Southern Florida's audio collection. The Open Culture list has links to famous speeches, poetry, and non-fiction, as well as the expected fiction. Enjoy!

4. I recently discovered The Electric Typewriter, a tumblr blog that has collated links to work of some of the best writers and journals ever. There are 15 essays by Joan Didion, for example; 25 essays about the big topic "Life" by Sheila Heti, Annie Dillard, Zadie Smith, Jonathan Franzen, etc.;  topics in linguistics by Joshua Foer, Stephen Pinker and Jack Hitt; and on and on. Pretty much  every topic you can think of is covered: here's David Shields on tattoos for The Village Voice, for example. Yay!

First Poems

My mother saved some of my first poems. When I was too small to write them down myself, I commanded her to pen my reworkings of nursery rhymes, including this one:

Hickory Dickory Dock
A chicken says Cluck Cluck.
So if you meet a chicken,
Say Cluck Cluck.

Did you like the surprise ending?

The family favorite, one that is still thrown at me mockingly, is:

In the meadow
In the breeze
That is where
I caught my sneeze.

And one of my personal favorites, from the advanced age of nine, begins, "The boat of testimony is coming round the bend / But I cannot see it for eternity will never end." Yes, I lost the cadence there (among other things!).

Well, I'm not alone in having my early verse recorded. Emily Temple at Flavorwire has collected the first known poems of ten poets, including Plath, Proust, and Poe. As well as e. e. cummings, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allen Poe, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. And at this point I run out of alliterative (or assonic or whatever the adjective for assonance is) names, so go look for who the others are yourself, at the link.

News in Poetry

Do you get the weekly newsletter from The Review Review? (If not, you can sign up here.) I've been getting it for a month or so now, and every issue has linked me with articles and resources that are useful or interesting.

For instance, this week they report on The Grinder, a site aiming to take over the void left when Duotrope became a fee-oriented tracking service and database, keeping many cash-strapped writers from being able to use their once-free services any longer. Right now The Grinder is only up and running for fiction markets, but it plans to add poetry and non-fiction soon.

In other news, Ocean Vuong, a young poet I admire and whose name is the name as one of my sons and for just about the same reason, is intereviewed at The Well & Often Reader.

Poetry Kanto, Japan's longest-running bilingual journal (which counts among its impressive list of past contributors Jane Hirshfield, Alicia Ostriker, Ilya Kaminsky, and Judy Halebsky) has recently become an online journal, leaving behind its paper history. They have a call for submissions out now; submit 3-5 poems before June.

Harpur Palate, another journal I routinely enjoy, is calling for submissions for a "country living themed issue." If you've got something related, or could write something, give them a try.

Finally, not exactly breaking news but news to me nonetheless, Flavorwire has some crazy punctuation marks to consider. Do you know the ElRey mark, for example? When you want to express equivocal enthusiasm, use this:

And, unfortunately too late for Valentine's Day, we learn of the Love Point:

And who doesn't need a sarcasm mark?:

Flavorwire has seven other obscure punctuation marks, and you can find more such marks at my blogpost from 2011 called "Recognize these Puncs?"

What's Neat on the Net IV

This week, what's neat on the net:

1) You can hear a recording of Walt Whitman reading the first four lines of his celebrated poem "America." Or maybe you can't. For a brief overview of the controversy on the authenticity of this recording, as well as to hear, the recording yourself, click this link to a posting on the Open Culture blog.

2) At Bookriot, Amanda Nelson imagines the base and top notes of perfumes inspired by dead writers such as Fitzgerald, Sexton, Tolstoy, and Plath. For example, Flannery O’Connor's perfume is described as being a blend of church incense, soap, vanilla, ginger. So far these scents exist only in Nelson's imagination, but who knows what the future brings.

3) DOG EAR, out of London, is both a magazine and a bookmark. Submit prose or drawings, and once 40 pieces have been collected, the top 10 will be made into a bookmark and distributed about the London area. That sounds like fun, doesn't it?

4) From Flavorwire, hotels and hotel rooms inspired by literature, including the Jules-Verne-inspired "Journey to the Center of the Earth" ice room at the Hotel de Glace in Canada; Alain de Botton's London hotel, The Roi de Belges, with a room designed to replicate Joseph Conrad's steamer used in the Congo trip that inspired Heart of Darkness; and the Hobbit Hotel in New Zealand. I especially like Le Pavillion de Lettres in Paris, with each of its 26 rooms devoted to a different writer, one room each for each letter of the alphabet matched to the first letter of  the last name of that writer. Check out the photos here.

5) Writer's Relief posts arts and crafts you can make out of your rejection letters. From papier mache to origami and rolled paper crafts, this site has plenty of ideas for what to do with those soul-stultifying pieces of paper.

I'll be saving mine however. Recently I've had a stream of rejections, in start contrast to 2 years ago when everything I sent out was accepted and I was being solicited for work that I didn't have because everything was being accepted. Now I can't seem to place a single poem.

It's good for me to remember that it's cyclical. Sure, instead of a gentle sine wave cycle, this is me slamming between polar opposites, but it's still important to remember the cycle of good things and bad things that happen. It's human nature when bad things happen to think that the streak of bad luck will end, but when good things are happening, it's important to also remember that such a state of grace is temporary. My kids hate it when I tell them this during the good times; they just want to enjoy the fun and not have it dampened by the reminder. But the downside will be less down it if doesn't also blindside you.

So now I need to think about my rejections. I think the quality of my work is about the same as ever, but the sensibility has shifted. Maybe I need to try different markets than the ones I generally look to. Maybe I'm wrong about the quality (in the absence of readers to help me along here in Japan) or maybe the competition is just getting more vast or more talented, and I need some kind of breakthrough in order to reach a new level. Maybe I just need to write and not worry about publishing.

And it's a wrap.

Business Cards of the Famous

This is kind of fun. Flavorwire has compiled a post on the business cards of famous people.

Two for Today

Two fun things from two of my favorite websites.

First, from  Maria Popova's Brain Pickings, the first print ads for some classic books, including this one for Joyce's Ulysses:

These print ads come from Dwight Garner's book Read Me: A Century of Classic American Book Advertisements. See more such ads at Brain Pickings,  including some from books by Didion, Hemingway, Plath, Delillo, and more. Enjoy!


Second, Flavorwire has literary quote tattoos.

And that's it for today.

Covering Up

Flavorwire has fashions inspired by literature. They range from the whimsical, a dress made from Little Golden Book covers:

by designer Ryan Novelline, via Cory Doctorow's website

to the wearable, a shirt inspired by the cover of Plath's The Bell Jar,

from Kingdom of Style

See more at Flavorwire.

Everybody's Silly Sometimes

Flavorwire has 10 silly pictures of serious people, like this one:

 

They've also got silly photos of serious artists, and silly photos of serious authors.

Advice from Fitzgerald

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote this letter of advice to a young family friend after reading her short story. Flavorwire, which ran this letter today, entitled it "You've got to sell your heart."

Beauty for Kids

Flavorwire's 20 Most Beautiful Children's Books Ever (including one written by poet Ted Kooser & illustrated by Jon Klassen). What's your favorite children's book, and is it because it's beautiful?

Pop-up Madness

Flavorwire has outdone themselves this time, with a collection of pop-up books for adults (but not that kind of book for adults, don't worry).

My favorites are the alphabet book by Marion Bataille, and CERN's explanation of the Large Hadron Collider, in pop-up book form, though there's something to be said for the Lego pop-up Kinkakuji (Golden Pavilion in Kyoto), and I've got to admire Shawn Sheehy's linoleum block prints in 3D.

And while we're being visual, see what Book Riot deemed the most interesting book covers at the Book Expo America 2012.

Notable Notebook Pages

This week Flavorwire brings us notebook pages from the private musings of such luminaries as Jack Kerouac, Frida Kahlo, Mark Twain, Charlotte Bronte, David Foster Wallace, and more. And for those of you who love lists, you haven't seen a To-Do list till you've seen Thomas Edison's. Cotton picker and electric piano (apparently, "invent them" is the meaning) are just two items of more than twenty such ambitious projects. Melville wrote in green (pencil? ink?). And Einstein kept a travel diary. Who knew!

Birthday Buddies

What do the cartoon cat Garfield and I have in common, besides the fact that our last names begin with the letter "G"? (Or is Garfield his first name?) Well, anyway, we both have the same birthday (and we both love lasagne). (But I'm older...do I look it?)

If you want to know which fictional character shares your birthday, Flavorwire has compiled a list for every day of the year. Check it out. You might get lucky, like my grandmother, who opens her presents on the same day as Indiana Jones. Or maybe your birthday coincides with Captain Marvel's or Sherlock Holmes' or Dr. House's. Or Billy Pilgrim's or Kermit the Frog's. (Too bad most of these references seem to be from pop culture rather than literature, but maybe somebody will put together another more intellectual list, Billy Pilgrim notwithstanding...)

If you share a day with someone interesting, feel free to post below.

Murakami Around the World

Flavorwire has today provided me with the most fun I've had in a long time. In honor of Haruki Murakami's birthday (which apparently is 1/12, and therefore already finished in Japan, and likely nearly done or all done for the year where you are too), they have put together different book covers of his novels from editions all over the world. Compare the Vietnamese cover of Kafka On the Shore to the German one, for example. See which country's style you tend to favor. I found the Israeli covers largely sympathetic, for instance, and would never have known that otherwise. See many different Murakami covers here, and I'll paste some of my favorites below.

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicles covers are lots of fun for me, because I have a passion for bird imagery. Check these out:

Israeli edition

 Turkish ediiton

Slovakian edition

More bird imagery in the Vietnamese edition of Kafka on the Shore:



Here are the Russian A Wild Sheep Chase covers:

And check out covers to the new 1Q84 from around the world here.

Art Imitating Life

This is the Zen rock garden Ryoanji carved out of the top of a vintage (Japanese) book. This work and more by Guy Laramee can be seen at his website.

Including work like the following:

Thanks to Flavorwire for the article that originally made me aware of Laramee's work.

Lego Poets (My Worlds Collide)

Okay, as a parent who has had to sit sideways on my desk chair to use the computer because a Lego creation had been assembled underneath the desk, as a mother who has repeatedly had six small dots imprinted into the bottom of my foot from stepping on a Lego, I appreciate this:

Everseradio.com has a (old) blog post showing poets made out of Legos. Consider, for instance, the blocky Ezra Pound:



Everseradio.com borrowed their images from Flavorwire, which featured writers of all ilk in Lego form, including Mark Twain and Rene Descartes:






And frankly, I like the Lego Louisa May Alcott better than I liked the Mona Lisa Barbie (even if Louisa does look a little like Princess Leia, which as the mother of Star-Wars-lego-set-owning children, I can tell you is no coincidence; Descartes pieces I recognize from the Castle set, which we also own).



To see Hemingway, Poe, and more of your favorite classic writers in Lego, head over to Flavorwire.