ampere’s and
This week’s visuals: Nabokov vs Nabokov & New Chris Ware cover for the New Yorker [via @tomgauld] & Book By Its Cover on Penguin 75, the best covers in last 10 years including Anders Nilsen, Chris Ware & Ruben Toledo [via @criscler] & James Pardey on David Pelham‘s Ballard covers & Edward Gorey book covers […]
Blood Rites of the Bourgeoisie
Van Gogh thought of sunflowers as disturbing flowers, being always in various stages of decay, always between living and dying. Home, as always, has carefully structured his book and by using these sunflower texts as alternative tablets of text – so we get his fiction followed by a block of spam throughout – he is able to show how indexicality unfixes the solid flesh of script into something more turbulent and fluid. Yet the viral aspect of the spam messages introduces the idea of language being generated as a spontaneous living form and at the same time as an ultimately dead one too. The messages are literally mindless and the substitution of artists’ names into the message strings arbitrary and random. The viral element has the sinuous aristocratic fluidity of the undead.
Richard Marshall reviews Stewart Home‘s new novel.
Tonight the Novel Will Have a Nervous Breakdown
Book Works presents: Semina – where the novel has a nervous breakdown, with Stewart Home, Katrina Palmer and Jarett Kobek. Caf é Oto 22 Ashwin Street, Dalston, London E8 3DL (020 7923 1231) 7pm – late 14 June Free entrance Tonight Book Works celebrates the publication of three new titles in the Semina series with […]
Move to the City
Fascinating piece on the modern metropolis in the FT by Edwin Heathcote, that takes in three Verso books on the subject – The Situationists & the City, Restless Cities & Cities Under Siege – alongside Sharon Zukin’s Naked City: The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places: For more than two centuries writers have attempted […]