David Mitchell, when questioned about his language and genre experiments, particularly in Cloud Atlas and The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet, responds: “It’s a bit like asking a duck billed platypus if it should be considered a mammal or a bird.” The Millions also profiled Mitchell, though we never settled either way on the bird/mammal issue.
From word nerd to language animal
Freeplay
StoryBundle, a new service that lets you pay as much (or as little) as you want for preselected bundles of ebooks, announced on Wednesday that their latest bundle is a collection of writing about video games. Among other things, it includes two books by Jordan Mechner, the man behind Prince of Persia, as well as two issues of Kill Screen.
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More on Lydia Davis
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Seeing Sound
Have you ever wondered what a music note might look like? Now you have, so go and check out Resonantia by artists Jeff Louviere and Vanessa Brown, a work which tests the limits of “cymatics—the patterns that sound waves induce in physical objects.” One of Louviere’s projects involved photographing the “shapes” of each of the 12 notes. Spoiler alert: G looks like a devil.
No Bastion for Books
“She gathered books to display for attendees and discovered that inside the cover of one, ‘The Koran for Dummies,’ someone had written “lies cover to cover,” drawn a swastika and made a disparaging remark about the Prophet Muhammad.” The president of the American Library Association reports “startling increases” in 2016 of vandalism, including hateful messages, at libraries. The Association’s Office for Intellectual Freedom has begun formally tracking such incidents to determine whether the increase is “a blip or a trend.”
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In China, my name is Mud.
Chinese citizens are increasingly adopting English nicknames. But, why would anyone choose a name like “Rainman” or “Mud”? The new book In China, My Name is… explores this puzzling phenomena. (Awesome t-shirt, Ben)
I’d say his books are like birds because they allow the reader an aerial view of the landscape as you fly past hills and towns, ships and villages and peek into the windows of people’s inner lives.
I love his work!
kc