Saturday, April 9, 2011 at 9:27AM | Torea Jade 
I desperately want to laze under the branches of these book trees (from Kostas Syrtariotis of Kostas Designs), perhaps with a weathered copy of Jane Eyre in my hands.
And, while we're on a home-decor kick, I also wouldn't mind curling up to finish Lonesome Dove in the fluffy pages of this book bed, a piece by Japanese artist Yusuke Suzuki.
Tuesday, March 29, 2011 at 7:41PM | Torea Jade Are you a writer or an artist (or a publisher or just an engaged citizen)? Contribute to a super-cool project to populate an independent bookstore that will inhabit, for four or five weeks, the shell of an abandoned Borders in Pittsburgh. From Fleeting Pages:
In essence, Fleeting Pages consists of taking over (taking back??) one of the spaces, left empty by a failed big box bookstore in Pittsburgh, for one month, starting April 30th, and filling it with independent & self-published work of all kinds, book arts, workshops, events ...
The idea is a result of a few things; the toll taken on local booksellers by big box bookstores, a concern for the cultural effects of big box stores in both their existence and their failure, a general frustration with the model of the publishing industry, and a great appreciation for independent and self-published works of all kinds, as well as for those who create them.
We felt compelled to do something. Fleeting Pages is what we came up with. It will test the theory that what is happening with “books” – creation, consumption, access – matters to many. And if given the opportunity to take over, or take back, one of these empty spaces they will. And in the most brilliant of ways.
The end result, what Fleeting Pages will ultimately become, is a beautiful unknown as it is dependent upon what others are willing to add. The framework is there – the space, the concept, and a few people willing to work their hardest in support of the project.
Fleeting Pages is in need of, and open to, work of all kinds to fill the shelves, ideas and people to create and run workshops, ideas for how to re-imagine the space, 30-days of events, people willing to come out and help at the space, partnerships, collaborations,….a community.
As of today, we have 5 weeks until the proposed opening day….. Let’s test what’s possible.
I'm thinking of pulling together some of my writing and photography from the last year and self-publishing something with the help of Lulu. Such a cool project!
Monday, March 28, 2011 at 9:50PM | Torea Jade 
I just finished Abdelfattah Kilito's The Clash of Images, a series of thirteen stories about a boy named Abdallah growing up in urban Morocco.
The Quarterly Conversation has a great review of this lovely, slender book, and I'm afraid I can't quite do the same justice. I can say, however, that "Pleiades" might be one of the most perfect little pieces I've read this year, and "Cinedays," which follows it, is a stunning observation on how people a world away from America take the same cultural touchstone (in this case, a Western) and dissect, remix, and reimagine the object into a wholly new vision.
Post a Comment | Share Article | tagged abdelfattah kilito, books, reading, the clash of images, world culture in books Tuesday, March 8, 2011 at 7:48PM | Torea Jade Simply shout, "Unhand me, greybeard loon!" This was Beverly Cleary's course of action when her first boyfriend got a little aggressive. She explains, "He obeyed, but he must have been mystified by the words from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."
I just finished A Girl From Yamhill, and I don't know that I could have enjoyed it more. Cleary, who you know as the mind behind Ramona Quimby, recounts her girlhood in Depression-era Oregon; the language is simple and the stories nothing outrageous, but her high spirits and quiet intelligence shine through on every page.
(An unrelated factoid: we went to the same summer camp (Namanu!), though I swam in the Sandy River about sixty-five years after she did.)
Sunday, February 13, 2011 at 6:31PM | Torea Jade 
You just never know what you're going to find in a thrift store. Today, Sumeet unearthed this gem, a guide to traveling in France, printed in 1956. February, the guide notes, is a good time to travel, as Paris then hosts the "Salon of Housekeeping Arts." Alas, we'll be going half a century too late.
On with the show. First things first: you're going to have to orient yourself. Perhaps this will help?
And I suppose you'll be hungry. "There are reputed to be about 8,000 restaurants in Paris. You can get a good meal in at least half of them," according to TWA. The guide lists dozens of cuisines, including "Cheese" -- my kind of people. I, for one, would also like to visit Hostellerie du Coq Hardy: "Sam, the self-styled 'cuisinier troubadour,' not only serves delicious meals but entertains with an extraordinary act of trained chickens." In case the French doesn't trip off your tongue while at the table:
Once you're sated, you might consider a bit of theatre. The Folies Bergère offers "Nudes and spectacular stage settings."
Or you could try a little retail therapy: Hermes and Lanvin are highly recommended. Or you could go to E. Goyard Aine, a "specialty shop for pampered dogs ... Rubber bones give cracking sounds, are perfumed with chocolate. For insomniac dogs, felt-covered music boxes."
If that's not enough for you, fussbudget, you might be pleased to know that there are sights to be seen. What, the Eiffel Tower's in Paris?
Oh, who am I kidding; let's just unwind with a nice glass of red. Nothing says class like grumpy stemware.
And ladies, lest all this talk of exchange rates, etc., confuse you, Mary Gordon of TWA to the rescue! She has many tips, most of which relate to shopping. And, oh yes, "Take it easy ... don't sightsee all day. Do whatever local people do for amusement and relaxation." (I think that means more wine!)
Safe travels!
Post a Comment | Share Article | tagged art, books, fly TWA, france, paris, sightseeing, travel, vintage illustrations, wine drinking in books, travel Sunday, January 30, 2011 at 2:57PM | Torea Jade 
There was something of a stir last year when Lydia Davis's new translation of Madame Bovary came out, but I was more or less content with the single dog-eared copy of it on my shelf. Until, that is, we stopped at Argosy Books and found an old edition, concealed in a cover dappled with pink roses; with its lovely thick paper and a spate of cool illustrations, old Emma was practically begging me to purchase it.
It's a little unclear when this edition was published, though the Internet suggests perhaps sometime in the 1940s. (This would fit with the era Richard Lindner was working.)
This translation is Eleanor Marx Aveling's, the first English version of Bovary. (Eleanor was the youngest daughter of Karl Marx, poisoned herself with prussic acid when she discovered her lover had married another woman.)
Sunday, January 16, 2011 at 10:39AM | Torea Jade 
It really is stunning, the sheer amount of information at our fingertips on the Web. Perhaps I should not mention that the following is how I spend my weekend, but ... alas.
Yesterday, I finished Ender's Game (who knew? I'm sort of loving science fiction!), and I picked an unread book off my shelf: Simon Winchester's The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Oxford English Dictionary, the story of OED editor James Murray and contributor WC Minor, who happened to live (for more than 30 years) in an asylum.
I'm almost finished, and my God, how the world has changed. It took decades, and tens (hundreds? Thousands?) of volunteers, reading books in English and cataloguing words, illustrated by historical usage, on slips of paper that they then passed along to Murray. I can't speak to the process that goes into the dictionary's revision today, but information is just so much faster: you don't even have to thumb through impossible, unwieldy tomes any more, you can simply log on to OED.com. I learned about the Web site's revamp (a list of changes can be found here) through a tweet by Felix Salmon; through February 5, 2011, you can log on for free and explore using the username "trynewoed" and the password "trynewoed." (Or, if you just want a glimpse of what one entry looks like, here is a sample, the definition of "digital.")
But, being curious like a cat, I was not (am not) content to simply explore the high-level subjects of the book. No, Winchester repeatedly mentions a publication from that era, The Athenaeum (a literary and scientific review printed in London from 1828 to 1923), and I wanted to know more. It was a long shot, but there was so little to lose that I decided to try anyway: I plugged the title into Google Books.
Lo and behold, a copy of an issue covering January to June, 1870, popped up; the full text was available. This issue came from the Harvard University library. It is formatted in three columns and the type is tiny; it would be difficult, if not impossible, to undertake any academic research based on this digital collection, but for a dilettante such as myself, it is a gold mine.
I've been skimming the work for quite some time now. My progress is hampered by my frequent tracking down of other interesting books mentioned, even in passing. For example, I fell into a rabbithole looking at Old Merry's Queer Discourses on Queer Proverbs, for which the etching of the cat and mice above served as a frontispiece.
Who or what was "Old Merry"? Well, for that, I have no answer; Google did not provide adequate information, only references to "old, merry England," and a link back to The Athenaeum. To the New York Public Library with ye!
Saturday, January 1, 2011 at 5:41PM | Torea Jade 
Le Corbusier, an architect and painter, created The Modulor, an anthropometric scale of proportions in the vein of Vitruvius, da Vinci, and Alberti, in 1943. (My fascination with Le Corbusier stems from Sumeet's growing up in Chandigarh, India's first planned city, which the architect had a big hand in planning.)
Le Corbusier described the measure as a "range of harmonious measurements to suit the human scale, universally applicable to architecture and to mechanical things"; I picked up this copy of The Modulor (second edition, trans. Peter De Francia and Anna Bostock, Harvard University Press, 1966) from The Strand's $1 book cart. I admit that I understand the math behind it very little, but I love that he applies the system to city planning, building construction, painting and composition, and the movement of consumer goods.
Lots of scans behind the cut, and in my Flickr set.
Friday, December 31, 2010 at 6:24PM | Torea Jade 
Definitely not going to finish The American Language (HL Mencken) or The Metropolis Case (Matthew Gallaway) before midnight, so here, with little comment, and in no particular order, are the books that fed my brain between January and December (favorites bolded):
Hey, cool -- that's more than a book a week! Maybe next year, I'll make it an even 100. Not sure what to take away from this; apparently, I like women writers, I like fiction more than nonfiction, and I skew toward white American writers?
Anyone want to borrow a book? Lemme know. The lending library is open in Astoria. Also, my beloved book club has more or less disbanded. New year, new group?
Friday, December 31, 2010 at 3:56PM | Torea Jade New additions (from Powell's Books in Portland and Argosy Books on 59th between Park and Lex):
I just finished Sacred Games (Vikram Chanda) and Another Bullshit Night in Suck City (Nick Flynn). Sacred Games was just what I needed for vacation: sprawling but fast paced, absorbing, full of Hindi expletives (bhenchod!). Haven't read many memoirs lately, and Suck City was a pretty good one; it focuses on Flynn's relationship, or lack thereof, with his father, a writer/bank robber/homeless man in Boston who begins sleeping at the shelter Flynn is employed by. At heart, it's just a fascinating story. And it's true: "There are many ways to drown, only the most obvious wave their arms as they're going under."
Sumeet and I are keeping it low-key for the night: trying out Tiffin New York, finding something good on Netflix, listening to our cat mewl, and breaking out the Martinelli's at midnight. Here's to 2011! We (plus my parents) salute you from our great backyard in Milwaukie!
