“The way Vermeer painted this wall is consistent with a photograph. It is not consistent with human vision.” In a fascinating new documentary by Penn and Teller, a digital-graphics artist spent five years building a lens, a room, and a harpsichord to figure out how.
Vermeer was a Hacker
Creating Safe Little Worlds With Eloghosa Osunde
Eloghosa Osunde discusses her debut novel, Vagabonds!, in which love and romance help the cast of characters navigate their demons.
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“Full, unfettered pomp”
On Friday, I wrote about the British writer William Boyd, whose new play, Longing, debuted last week at London’s Hampstead Theatre. The play is based on two of Chekhov’s short stories, one of which (according to Boyd’s new article in The Guardian) sheds light on the great author’s love life. Apparently the young Anton had “at least two dozen” affairs.
Dispatches from Guangzhou
Take a vicarious trip to China via a special issue of Ninth Letter, a literary and arts journal published by the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign. Including work by authors Madelaine Thien and Khaled Al Khamissi, the issue grew out of a residency sponsored by Sun Yat-sen University’s Center for English-language Creative Writing, the only such department of its kind in that country. Pair with this piece by Casey Walker about writing his novel Last Days in Shanghai, which is set in the boomtown of today’s new China.
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Fractal Surfaces
Recommended Reading: On Marianne Moore’s infectious devotion to all things small, and how that same devotion helped make her Observations one of the great verbal works of art of the 20th century.
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J Dickens
Yea, yea, it’s Charles Dickens’ birthday. I’m sure you’ve heard, or at least been told by Google. But he’s only one artist born on this day. In addition, there’s James Yancey aka J Dilla, one of the most influential hip hop artists and producers of all time.
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Lego My Struggle
“Each one of those books is, like, several hundred pages long. So, that’s a lot of romantic anxiety and adolescent/young-adult/middle-aged angst to distill into pictures, but as far as I can tell, it’s all there: salted fish, shower-sex, alcohol-induced existential despair, the whole shebang! No reading required.” The Melville House blog, MobyLives, revisits the work of an anonymous artist who reenacted all of Karl Ove Knausgaard‘s My Struggle series using LEGOs. See also: our review of Knausgaard’s epic.
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Will the real Don Draper please stand up?
Chicago Magazine‘s charming 2009 profile of Draper Daniels, a.k.a. the real life Don Draper, written by Myra Janco Daniels, a.k.a. his wife.
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Charlie and the Chocolate Bookstore
Chocolate can cure a lot of things but what about the ailing bookstore? Belgian researchers have found that bookstores that smell like chocolate boost sales, especially of romance novels. What about bacon?
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