I Am Not A Gun

Sherlock 2010

I'm really enjoying new Beeb miniseries of Sherlock Holmes set in the present day. Bonus: It stars British Office Tim (US Jim) as Dr. Watson! You can watch it here (thanks Chinese youtube!).

Elizabeth Bishop — Letter to N.Y.

And speaking of David Rakoff, this is the poem he chanted to himself while getting MRIs to stay calm. I'll forever think of it while watching the city lights pass by, slumped in a late night cab going home (despite the cringe-worthy rhyming of soul and owl):

In your next letter I wish you'd say
where you are going and what you are doing;
how are the plays and after the plays
what other pleasures you're pursuing:

taking cabs in the middle of the night,
driving as if to save your soul
where the road goes round and round the park
and the meter glares like a moral owl,

and the trees look so queer and green
standing alone in big black caves
and suddenly you're in a different place
where everything seems to happen in waves,

and most of the jokes you just can't catch,
like dirty words rubbed off a slate,
and the songs are loud but somehow dim
and it gets so terribly late,

and coming out of the brownstone house
to the gray sidewalk, the watered street,
one side of the buildings rises with the sun
like a glistening field of wheat.

—Wheat, not oats, dear. I'm afraid
if it's wheat it's none of your sowing,
nevertheless I'd like to know
what you are doing and where you are going.

David Rakoff — Half Empty

Just finished David Rakoff's new book Half Empty and promptly put his previous books on my To Read list. I laughed, I cried, and he's much too smart to reduce to a summary quote, but these are some of my favorite zingers:

If others had reservations about trusting me, they seemed to dissipate as quickly as that fleeting moment where one hesitates before undressing in front of the dog.

I am in a canvas that Edward Hopper never felt bummed out enough to paint.

...how lovely the friends who deliver a potted amaryllis... its pink and-and-white striped petals like a child's drawing of an ideal flower, if children could actually draw.

Two great interviews about his book: Daily Show / Fresh Air

And finally, the first ten minutes of his Oscar-winning adaptation (in which he also acts) short film, The New Tenants:

And then, lastly, there's this self-assessment:

Should you happen to be possessed of a certain verbal acuity coupled with a relentless, hair-trigger humor and surface cheer spackling over a chronic melancholia and loneliness—a grotesquely caricatured version of your deepest Self which you trot out at the slightest provocation to endearing and glib chronic effect, thus rendering you the kind of fellow who is beloved by all yet loved by none, all of it to distract however fleetingly, from the cold and dead-faced truth that with each passing year you face the unavoidable certainty of a solitary future in which you will perish one day while vainly attempting the Heimlich maneuver on yourself over the back of a kitchen chair...

Fun!

You Should Have Heard Just What I Seen

Rick Rubin at home with his parents, 1986

Debbie Harry at home, 1977

This Friday from 6-8 at the KS Art Gallery (73 Leonard St) there will be a book launch and exhibition for photographer James Hamilton, one of the sweetest men I know. Come meet me there! I designed the book!

Here is Thurston's short, rapturous essay about James and a small slide show of his work on Vanity Fair's website. You can RSVP at rsvp@ecstaticpeacelibrary.com

Atlas of Remote Islands

The Atlas of Remote Places is one of the most beautiful books I've seen in a long time. If I had the money I'd buy everyone I know a copy. Judith Schalansky both wrote and designed this small tome after weeks of what I assume was a rabbit-hole's worth of research in Berlin's state library. The fine design and printing of the book would have been enough to make me want it but it's her essays, magical, probably true* vignettes or histories of each island that make the book a marvel. It is no wonder it won the 2009 prize for Most Beautiful Book in Germany.

* The author:

That’s why the question whether these stories are "true" is misleading. Every detail stems from factual sources…however I was the discoverer of the sources, researching them through ancient and rare books, and I have transformed the texts and appropriated them as sailors appropriate the lands they discover.

The librarian in me took a deep pleasure in sliding this book next to my copy of the Dictionary of Imaginary Places, a book I've been bringing with me everywhere since I got it in fourth grade. Without getting preachy, I really look forward to a future where the only books that continue to be printed are works of beauty for intimate perusal like this one.

And just because I love it so I'm tacking on Lewis Carroll's map of the ocean from The Hunting of the Snark:

He had bought a large map representing the sea,
Without the least vestige of land:
And the crew were much pleased when they found it to be
A map they could all understand.

“What’s the good of Mercator’s North Poles and Equators,
Tropics, Zones, and Meridian Lines?
So the Bellman would cry: and the crew would reply
“They are merely conventional signs!

“Other maps are such shapes, with their islands and capes!
But we’ve got our brave Captain to thank:
(So the crew would protest) “that he’s bought us the best—
A perfect and absolute blank!”