Now that classic sci-fi mag Omni has risen from the Hades of publishing, editors are combing its massive archives in search of material to republish. Among that material, it turns out, are drawings of Dune homeworld Arrakis — drawings that happen to be endorsed by none other than Frank Herbert himself.
Views of the Sandworm
More Frightened Than We’ve Ever Been
Following up on her latest book, On Immunity: An Inoculation, Year in Reading alum Eula Biss talks with Salon about "action movies, race, fear, violence and vaccination." Pair with Kyle Boelte's Millions review of On Immunity.
“I learned to look outward more”
“There are dangers for an artist in any academic environment,” says former Poetry editor Christian Wiman, who now teaches at the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. “Academia rewards people who know their own minds and have developed an ironclad confidence in speaking them. That kind of assurance is death for an artist.”
For Sale: Hemingway App, Doesn’t Work.
A new Hemingway App promises to trim the fat from your writing in a way that the Great Bearded One would’ve approved. The app uses various color codes to highlight writing written in the passive voice, writing that’s too hard to read, and also unnecessary adverbs or complex phrases. Sounds interesting enough, no? Well, the problem is that someone ran the Hemingway App on some actual Ernest Hemingway writing, and it turns out that Papa himself didn’t even write to the app’s standard.
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Between Page and Screen
Between Page and Screen is a collaboration between book artist and poet Amaranth Borsuk and programmer Brad Bouse that experiments with the border between regular old reading and e-reading. The text is rendered in a code that requires the aid of a web cam to unlock its sentences. The work's creators have been interviewed at imprint.
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Wimmer on Translation
Natasha Wimmer, translator of Roberto Bolaño's 2666 and Álvaro Enrigue's Sudden Death, explains her work process and why she’s translating a woman’s work next. Pair with our founder C. Max Magee’s thoughts on machine translation.
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Dalí’s Secret Word
Salvador Dalí appeared on an episode of the 1950s-1960s-era game show "What's My Line?". (via)
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Irish Drinking Songs for Cat Lovers
Do you love cats? Do you love Irish drinking songs? Do you love them together? Apparently, you are not alone. Marc Gunn of the Irish and Celtic Music Podcast has two parody albums devoted to this improbable marriage. Speaking for myself (in the words of the immortal Joe Turner), "I'm like a one-eyed cat, peeping in a seafood store..."
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