Links

A Man, a Plan, and a Sharpie. Two guys travel across the country correcting the spelling and grammar of signs, and then they write a book about it, which is called The Great Typo Hunt. Might be an interesting book. This is just the kind of thing my grammar-loving self would want to do.

Absolutely incredible pencil lead sculptures by Dalton Ghetti. There's a whole world in your pencil you never knew was possible. Link via Say Yes to Hoboken.

Pea plant grows inside man's lung. This is everything your parents ever told you would happen if you ate watermelon seeds.

Last weekend in California was Costume College, a convention of people who make historical costumes and dress up in them. I'd love to go to this some day. Photos can be found at flickr here, here, and here.

I happened to encounter two fabulous Seattle-based milliners/haberdashers last week. Bad Dog Hats does hats for people and their dogs, especially top hats. Tuzzie Muzzie makes lovely party hats and masks.

Here is a list of 260 websites that offer free, legal e-books. My opinions on books and the internet being what they are, I'm glad to see there are so many such sites.

A slice of LIFE, 1946

I wound up at a lovely old antique shop down under the viaduct in Seattle last Friday, and they had a collection of old LIFE magazines. They were only $5, which seems rather good considering a bit of googling finds me the issue I bought priced around $30. It was 10 cents in 1946. One of the articles is on a manuscript of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland that had recently been auctioned, so I figured I'd post it. (Click on any image to make it full-sized.)And here are some of the pages of the manuscript (not consecutive ones, as I'm sure you can tell).

Links

I had a long afternoon to spend yesterday, so in addition to starting Dorothy Sayers' Unnatural Death, I read a couple of articles I figured I'd link.

The first one is from the New York Times Magazine, entitled "How Christian Were the Founders?". It discusses changing views of how the founders of the US viewed religion and its place in government, how this should be represented in textbooks, and how the Texas school board influences education in the rest of the country.

The second one is probably more in my usual line, from the New Yorker: "But Enough About Me", which discusses the development of the memoir, how it relates to fiction and truth, and what memoir tells us about ourselves.

Depressing books

There's an article on abebooks.com where they've chosen the ten most depressing books. I have not read a single one of them, which makes me think about my reading habits. I don't typically read depressing books. I don't need a happy ending, but I need a hopeful one, and I simply don't really understand reading completely depressing books. They may be good books, but there are innumerable good books, and as long as you read good books in general there's really no reason why you have to read a particular good book. I suppose it all comes back around to why we read in the first place and what makes a particular book compelling when we do read it. I have no doubts that if I did for some reason read one of those ten books, I might completely love it no matter its depressing aspects.

When I took Senior Literature, last fall and the spring before that, I did feel like some of the books we read were read not so much because they were good books but because they were about very serious, discussion-provoking, often rather depressing subjects. This always bothered me about that class, though it was otherwise a fabulous class. I felt like we should be reading books because they were good, less than because they created discussions, and I always thought there were a lot of good books that could create discussion that were less depressing.

Have you read any of those ten books? Did you find them depressing?

Ask a Stupid Question

Monday, September 28th was Ask a Stupid Question Day in schools around Britain. I just thought I'd draw your attention to this article about it, because some of the questions and answers are rather wonderful.

Paper vs. pixels

There's an interesting New York Times article I came by the other day, about the evolution of publishing since the 1970s. I thought I'd draw your attention to it, and also muse a little on the dilemma it brings up for me. I have such an instinctive love of the way things used to be done, paper, typewriters, the sort of messy and physical way so many things used to be done, such as Joni Evans talks about in that article. I also in many ways love what the internet has done to publishing and to the dissemination of books and the possibilities for discussion of them. These two things never seemed like they were so in conflict until I read this article, and that conflict makes me a little uncomfortable.

Regardless of this musing, I really don't believe that paper is going to die out completely. Humans are too tactile to rely solely on pixels.

Something fun to read

I thought I'd direct your attention here. It's the Guardian's series of portraits (both photographic and written) of the spaces in which writers write. Most of the recent ones are writers I've never heard of, though going back further (there are several pages of these), we have Sebastian Barry (who I've heard of, but not read), Sebastian Faulks (who I've tried to read but not got around to actually reading), Elizabeth Jane Howard (reading her right now), Seamus Heaney, Claire Tomalin, JG Ballard, and lots of others. There's also a few of people such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, and Virginia Woolf, not, obviously, written by their subjects, as the others are. It's fascinating to have the writers' rooms explained, why they are as they are, the significance of various objects, what books they have, and they're all good writers, so they describe these things well. I often find myself lusting after such rooms as these. It would be lovely to have a place specially reserved for writing, although mine would definitely not involve a desk. Probably just a nice squashy sofa.

I would post a picture of where I'm currently writing, but it's rather a mess, clothes everywhere.