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!
Showing posts with label Open Culture. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Open Culture. Show all posts
Monday, April 1, 2013
Friday, February 15, 2013
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.
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.
Thursday, December 27, 2012
A Sendak Christmas Surprise
Maurice Sendak's animated Christmas fable from 1977, thanks to Open Culture.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)