Fat Cactus
JA
July 24
This week, from the creative genius of J. J. Abrams:
Tao Lin reviews ten blogging platforms
The Guardian thinks about the use of apocalyptic language in publishing – the book is dead, fiction is dead and we are all doomed etc etc.
‘I think comics sections should be treated as more of a visual arts page where it’s about publishing comic pieces, not pre-formatted boxes that stories are forced into’ – an interview with Paul Madonna
BibliOdyssey looks at some Hairy Grotesques
The Millions wonders whether it’s time to get a colonoscopy (of the grammatical variation)
Farrar, Straus and Giroux present Work In Progress a great new site which includes conversations with authors while their books are still being written (Jeffrey Eugenides is the first off the rank), Susan Sontag’s touring schedule from 1989 and interviews with book designers.
Wired Magazine predicts that Apple will create ‘a wireless handheld dubbed the iPad’ in its April, 1999 issue. How’s that for foresight?
Making a city of staples
The Twilight Saga: Eclipse as told through lolcats (via Alien Onion)
And finally, Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, the movie (with cheers to Oslo Davis for the link)
For daily Fat Cactus, follow @Meanjin on Twitter.
Our Friends
- Overland
- Alien Onion
- Ampersand Duck
- Andrew McDonald
- A Pair of Ragged Claws
- Arts Victoria
- Australia Council for the Arts
- Ben Eltham
- Bookshow blog
- CAL
- City of Tongues
- Crikey
- darkly wise, rudely great
- David Astle
- Elmo Keep Does Stuff
- The Ember
- Fly the Falcon blog
- Going Down Swinging
- Griffith Review
- Hackpacker
- Harvest
- HEAT
- Island
- Killings blog
- Literary Minded
- Lorraine Crescent
- Lynden Barber
- Mandy Ord
- Marcus Westbury
- Matilda
- Meanland
- Melbourne University Publishing
- Mel Campbell
- The Monthly
- Musings of an Inappropriate Woman
- Oslo Davis
- Paul Callaghan
- Read, Think, Write
- Sleepers Publishing
- Sorrow at Sills Bend
- SPLOG
- Tom Cho
- Virgule
- Wet Ink
- Wheeler Centre
Comments
26 Jul 10 at 22:25
What a juicy fat cactus. I loved the Millions article on colons. They are in vogue aren’t they? It seems conventional to use colons in the titles of academic papers now; they seem (at least to my cynical mind) to signal complexity.
The most engaging colon usage I’ve seen lately is in the title of a children’s book by Kim Kane, “Pip: the story of Olive”, because of the striking symmetry of syntax and meaning (a pip’s contained within an olive, as the left side of a colon clause contains or suggests the right side – or is that the other way around in Pip’s case?). That’s another point about the article – those colon categories are fun but I wonder if they could all be collapsed into one. I tend to think of a colon as a syntactical arrow, with the left side of the colon pointing to what follows it on the right side. Anyway, great article!
Is Norwegian Wood good? I’ve only read the Wind-up Bird Chronicle, which was bizarre.
...27 Jul 10 at 12:58
Yes I really liked Norwegian Wood. Chances are with Murakami you either hate him or love him. NW and Kafka on the Shore were brilliant (can’t wait to see this movie), but for some reason I never could wrap my head around Blind Willow Sleeping Woman.
A syntactical arrow: nice.
...