Recommended Reading: On new posters from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and space travel’s place in storytelling. Dominic Smith asks why there aren’t more stories in space.
Stories in Space
Following eBooks at CES
Open Publishing Lab is keeping tabs on all the ebook news coming out of the annual Consumer Electronics Show (CES) in Las Vegas with photos of the various new gadgets and prototypes. (Thanks, Buzz)
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We Think Alone, But We Email Each Other
“I’m always trying to get my friends to forward me emails they’ve sent to other people – to their mom, their boyfriend, their agent – the more mundane the better,” writes Miranda July in the treatment for her latest project, We Think Alone, which counts Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Etgar Keret, and Kirsten Dunst among its participants. “How they comport themselves in email is so intimate, almost obscene — a glimpse of them from their own point of view.”
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Press Start
Readers of the 1960s and 70s ran into many people who worried that writers were learning from television. In 2015, the concern is slightly different — are writers taking cues from video games? At the Ploughshares blog, Matthew Burnside tackles the game-ification of books.
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Keeping Tabs
The F.B.I. had a massive file on James Baldwin in the fifties and sixties. Among other things, their notes featured passages of surprisingly adept criticism, including an oddly in-depth look at sexuality in his work. You could also read Justin Campbell on race, fatherhood and Baldwin’s fiction.
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Drawing Connections
Stephen J. Gertz shows off some of Bukowski’s artwork; Sketches of F. Scott drawn by Zelda Fitzgerald and a portrait of their relationship by Anne Margaret Daniel; An interview with three of the more than 130 artists involved with The Graphic Canon, a series of illustrated literary classics.
Beauty Isn’t Logic Isn’t Beauty
Symmetry’s addictive. Beethoven sought it in the order of chords, Einstein in the logic of theory. Countless writers, too, have sought its imprint in the perfect mot juste. In Aeon Magazine, Philip Ball pleads fervently against the pursuit of beauty in logic, and logic in beauty. “There’s a reason why our galleries are not, on the whole, filled with paintings of perfect spheres… the search for an ideal, perfect Platonic form of the table amid spirals, hypercubes and pyramids has an air of desperation.”
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It’s an Honor
As a tribute to James Salter, who died on Friday at ninety, The Paris Review Daily republished his acceptance speech for their Hadada Prize, back in 2011. In the speech, Salter touches on George Plimpton, Barnes and Noble and his novel A Sport and a Pastime. You could also read our interview with the author.
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