At the Believer, Alison Bechdel spoke to Kristen Radtke about her newest book, The Secret to Superhuman Strength, and how she reflected on her own creative process as it came together. “I feel like I’m an unusually wordy cartoonist,” Bechdel says. “I often worry that that makes me somehow not quite authentic, like I should rely on the images more or give them more space, but I really do equally love to write and draw. I feel like these two elements are constantly fighting one another for space on the page. There’s never enough room for the drawing, there’s never enough room for all the words I want to use. And I like that process of just trying to trim it all down, and in the end not really being able to.”
The World of Wordy Cartoonists with Alison Bechdel
Link Bomb
The Columbia Spectator is about to embark on “a list of 50 books that we think capture the essence of each state.”Daniel Menaker, former head of Random House, is set to host a new internet literary talk show called “Titlepage.” It will be modeled after “‘Apostrophes,’ a popular French literary program; ‘The Charlie Rose Show’ on public television; and ‘Dinner for Five,’ in which a group of actors discussed their craft, on the Independent Film Channel.” Guests on the first show include Richard Price and literary it-boy Charles Bock.Quite a resource: The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Among the many entries: Death, God and Other Necessary Beings, Nothingness.We Feel Fine: Art from the hive mind.Landscape Urbanism Bullshit GeneratorFree Rice: procrastination fun for those with big vocabularies.The Corporation of London Libraries and Guildhall Art Gallery image database – huge, searchable collection of historical images of London, from which one can order prints.The Port Huron Statement, a part of the UVA Sixties ProjectTen Recurring Economic Fallacies – Put to rest “The Broken Window,” “The Beneficence of War,” and more.
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Sunday Reading
Booksellers from NYC’s famous indie bookstore McNally Jackson share 5 book recommendations with Harper’s Bazaar. Elsewhere, The Daily Beast has collected the best long reads of the past week.
It Becomes Your Dream
“All of your life, you think of that one fluid motion of power, terrorized by the fact we are capable of such collisions, such harm, such leveling of each other to flattened mountains, left to tunnel into ourselves, such wretched unhappiness, such unfathomable cruelty unless resurrected by the tenderness and affection of a lover, by kisses that leave us enthroned.” Major Jackson is next up in the Kiss series from Guernica Magazine — a weekly column which investigates that most intimate of human interactions, the kiss, in all its many manifestations.
Stieg Larsson-mania
Proof of a publishing feeding frenzy: It’s big news that a bunch of manuscripts that the late Stieg Larsson wrote when he was 17 have turned up.
Raise a Glass to That
Pop Chart Lab’s latest creation depicts some of the most famous cocktail-and-character pairings in literature and film. The gamut runs from Daisy Buchanan’s Mint Julep to The Dude’s White Russian. (Of course, the Preakness Stakes are this weekend, so really you should be drinking Black Eyed Susans.)