Books Category
The latest books and literature reviews, comment, features and interviews, with extracts from famous texts and neglected gems.
Former Blackburn Rovers striker Matt Jansen’s autobiography is a tale of anxiety, loss and love
In 2002, Blackburn Rovers striker Matt Jansen was on holiday in Rome. He could have been with England’s World Cup squad in Japan and South Korea. He’d narrowly missed out on selection – a 16-goal season had not been enough. So a trip to Italy with his girlfriend Lucy was booked. One sunny day they hired a moped to explore the city. What happened next changed everything. In his autobiography What Was, What Is and What Might Have Been, Jansen tells the story of life changed in a flash.
I was told I was going to the World Cup’ To win the League Cup and get called up by England, my ego was as big as it has ever been. I was at the top of my game, getting more and more confident. I was told I was going to the World Cup. The team was going to be announced the day after the penultimate game of the season.
We were playing Liverpool and Sven [Goran Eriksson] told Graeme Souness, who was Blackburn manager, not to tell me but say “don’t get injured” because I was going to be named in the World Cup squad.
He wasn’t picked. But Manchester United and Arsenal wanted him. Juventus had show a keen interest. Things would only get better. So to Rome…
We had got a taxi from the airport to the Hotel Eden at the top of the Spanish Steps and it was the worst journey I have ever had.
The way they drive in Rome, you toot the horn and have right of way I think. It is just chaotic.
So we hired this little scooter, a couple of helmets and we were pottering around Rome. We went to the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain and here and there. It was the best way for us to travel.
On the second day we went out again and Lucy was on the back and her helmet flew off. We were on our way back to the hotel, and were only about 600 metres from it.
We couldn’t find her helmet anywhere but there were some police parked on the side of the road and Lucy spoke to them and said: “OK if we go back to the hotel and then look for the helmet or get another helmet tomorrow?” And they said: “Yes, as long as you go straight back to the hotel” as they knew it was only 600 metres up the road.
I said “do you want my helmet?” and took it off and handed it to Lucy. She said: “No, no. You are driving; you had better keep it on.” Fortunately I did.We were coming around a corner, maybe 50 metres from the hotel at a crossroads. So I am edging out at this crossroads and as I am edging out there is a flash across me. A taxi smacks me on the side of the head and I take the full brunt. Lucy was thrown off the bike apparently and I was unconscious on the ground. That was me in a coma for six days.
Jansen has been stricken by crippling anxiety. But with help and hard work he’s improved. And – yep – he married Lucy.
Read: Matt Jansen: The Autobiography: What Was, What Is and What Might Have Been
Posted: 7th, September 2019 | In: Books, Sports, The Consumer | Comment
The Beatus Facundus: beautifying good and evil
We’ve not witnessed the end of the world. So the rich industry in predicting it continues. One day it really will be all over, the huge whimper triggering the race in the afterlife to scream ‘first!’. Beatus was not the first to peer into the future and see a decisive battle between God and the Devil. The Spanish monk created his Beatus Of Liébana in the 8th Century, a chronicle of the biblical book of Revelations. In the 11th Century King Ferdinand I of León, Castile, and Galicia wanted an updated version of Beatus’s work. So he shipped in a monk called Facundus to copy it. You can see lots more of the Beatus Facundus on Flashbak.
See every cover of the great MAD magazine – from 1952 to now
On Doug Gilford’s Mad Cover Site – “a resource for collectors and fans of the world’s most important (ecch!) humor publication” – you can see every cover since the magazine’s 1952 debut. Alfred E. Neuman is, of course, ever present.
Spotter: Flashbak
Posted: 5th, July 2019 | In: Books, The Consumer | Comment
An Epic caveat to a book review on German author and war hero Ernst Jünger
“Totally normal caveat such as you might find in any normal book review,” tweets Richard Smyth. He points us to a book review by Nigel Jones in the latest issue of History Today. The subject is German author and war hero Ernst Jünger (29 March 1895 – 17 February 1998).
Spotter: Richard Smyth
Posted: 28th, February 2019 | In: Books, Key Posts, Reviews | Comment
A look around Roald Dahl’s Dylan Thomas-themed writing shed
In 1982 Roald Dahl, showed us inside his writing shed at his home in Great Missenden, Buckinghamshire, England. The shed was relocated to the Roald Dahl Museum. The desk – a board balanced on the arms of a tatty chair – we knew about. Dahl called the 6ft x 7ft hut his “little nest, my womb”. One thing we didn’t know: Dahl modelled his shed on Dylan Thomas’s own writing shed in Carmarthenshire, Wales. The BBC:
Although Dahl based the design of his hut on Thomas’s shed, there was one major difference – the lack of natural light. He often kept his curtains drawn (10) to block out the outside world and was dependant on an angle-poise lamp for light….
Dahl’s widow Felicity said: “He realised he had to have a space of his own in the garden away from the children and the noise and the general domesticity and he remembered that Dylan had felt the same.
“And so he went down to Wales to look at Dylan’s writing hut and, like everybody, fell in love with it.”
Built to the same proportions, with the same angled roof – the similarities could be a coincidence. But according to his widow it was built in a similar design by Dahl’s builder friend Wally Saunders, who the BFG was based on.
“He built it exactly to the same proportions as Dylan’s hut, the same roof, one skin of brick,” said Mrs Dahl. “Of course Dylan’s hut was a garage originally, whereas Roald had nothing, it was an empty space that he built on.”
Spotter: Boing Boing
Posted: 1st, February 2019 | In: Books, Celebrities, Key Posts, News | Comment
Stan Lee reads Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven
‘The only advice anybody can give is, if you wanna be a writer, keep writing. And read all you can, read everything” – Stan Lee (December 28, 1922 – November 12, 2018).
One story Stan Lee read and enjoyed was Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven. The artist and storyteller who created Spider-Man, Iron Man and the X-Men reads from the book. It’s terrific. Thank you for all the stories, Stan Lee. “Excelsior!”
Spotter: Stan Lee reads Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven – Open Culture
Posted: 12th, November 2018 | In: Books, Celebrities, Key Posts | Comment
Princess Margaret’s absurd morning rituals were ‘such fun’
In 1955, Princess Margaret shared with the world her morning routine. The Queen’s chain-smoking sister’s regimented daily habits, with her “punishing schedule of drinking and smoking”, were revealed in Ma’am Darling by the satirist Craig Brown. “For a while,” writes Brown, Princess Margaret “glued matchboxes to tumblers so that she could strike matches while drinking, but it was a craze that never caught on.’ But worse than her fabled rudeness – an “unstoppable urge to say the first thing that came into her head, just so long as it was sufficiently unpleasant” – and vapid weltschmerz of her rank in life, were the sycophants. As Brown notes:
Receiving a prize from the young Princess Margaret in 1958, the 52-year-old John Betjeman was so overwhelmed by her curvaceous presence that tears came into his eyes, a reaction duly noted by his waspish friend, Maurice Bowra, the chairman of the judges, who lampooned it in a parodic verse:
“Green with lust and sick with shyness
Let me lick your lacquered toes.
Gosh, O gosh, your Royal Highness
Put your finger up my nose …”
Mingling with the obsequious is wonderful, but the morning’s were peak princess:
Princess Margaret’s morning routine c 1955. Yassgirl. pic.twitter.com/YbCAvhtfMC
— Gareth Roberts MA (Failed) (@OldRoberts953) October 20, 2017
They really are not like the rest of us. As JG Ballard noted in Princess Margaret’s Facelift: “Somewhere in this paradoxical space our imaginations are free to range, and we find ourselves experimenting like impresarios with all the possibilities that these magnified figures seem to offer us.” As Mags would say through a tight mouth, her sarcastic eyes a small sign of life amongst the panto Munsters, “Such fun!”
Posted: 15th, October 2018 | In: Books, Key Posts, Royal Family | Comment
Stormy Daniels teaches Donald Trump that porn star sex is rubbish
What’s it like to have sex with Donald Trump? Until Melania goes full Princess Diana and reveals all, we can roll over and ask Stormy Daniels (aka Stephanie Clifford) about intercourse with The Don. “It may have ben the least impressive sex I’ve ever had,” is the lead quote on the Mirror’s front page. So there’s Trump in his ‘I’m Number 1 why Try Harder’ T-shirt possibly expecting new adventures with a professional shagger. Reading Stormy damn Trump brings to mind the tennis pro playing with the happy amateur. The pro knocks the ball over the net with spin, power and guile; the amateur hits a sublime return, his game improved immeasurably by the skill of his partner . I once played head tennis with a top footballer. With an equally hapless mate, I could manage 6 or seven headers. But with talent we got to 20, 30, 40… So, Donald Trump, what’s it like to have sex with a pro?
On page 7, we learn that Trump’s penis is “smaller than average” but not “freakishly small”. “He knows he has an unusual penis,” says Stormy T-Cup. “It has a huge mushroom head like a toadstool.” did little Mis Muffet sit on the engorged tuffet? “I lay there,” she says enticingly, “annoyed I was getting fucked by a guy with yeti pubes and a dick like the mushroom character in Mario Kart.” so much for the fantasy porn star level sex. Stick with the love doll, smut enthusiasts. You won’t get judged.
On page 10, Stormy’s lie-there-and-tell becomes “Donald stump”. In the Sun, we learn that Stormy’s tribute to gaming forms part of her book, Full Disclosure. Donald isn’t a “fun guy” in bed, the paper puns. We’re reminded there and in the Express that Trump denies the affair. She claims to have been paid “hush money”. And Trump reimbursed his then lawyer, Michael Cohen, for the money she received, $130,000. Yep. That’s what it allegedly costs to shag an angry woman who thinks you’re an inadequate loser. There’s a book in it – but not a token entitling the bearer to a discount on marriage guidance…
Posted: 19th, September 2018 | In: Books, Celebrities, Politicians, Tabloids | Comment
James Joyce crayon marked manuscripts for Ulysses and Finnegans Wake
James Joyce crayon marks on his manuscript for ulysses
James Joyce wrote Finnegans Wake “lying on his stomach in bed, with a large blue pencil, clad in a white coat, and composed most of Finnegans Wake with crayon pieces on cardboard,” says Maria Popova. “The large crayons… helped him see what he was writing, and the white coat helped reflect more light onto the page at night.”
His obituary in the NYTimes noted:
While living in Zurich Joyce began to suffer from severe ocular illness and eventually underwent at least ten operations on his eyes. For years he was almost totally blind and much of his later writing was done with red crayon on huge white sheets of paper.
“Joyce used a different colored crayon each time he went through a notebook incorporating notes into his draft,” adds Derek Attridge in a review of The Finnegans Wake Notebooks at Buffalo. The crayons were “a scrupulousness which has never been satisfactorily explained”.
And steeped in deep meaning, of course, Unlkess the witer was a great meketeer. As he said: “I’ve put in so many enigmas and puzzles that it will keep the professors busy for centuries arguing over what I meant – and that’s the only way of insuring one’s immortality.”
Spotter: Flashbak, Open Culture
Philip Roth RIP – with replies by John Updike, The Atlantic and Wikipedia
Philip Roth, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1998, has died. He was 85. Claudia Roth Pierpont said his books looked at “the Jewish family, sex, American ideals, the betrayal of American ideals, political zealotry, personal identity [and] the human body (usually male) in its strength, its frailty, and its often ridiculous need.” And, boy, was he funny.
In 1996 Roth reacted to Claire Bloom’s memoir Leaving a Doll’s House. The actress commented at length on her and Roth’s marriage. “He’s tense; she’s tense,” said Gore Vidal said. “Each is neurotic. They were together 17 years; it couldn’t have been all that bad. It’s always best to stay out of other people’s divorces. And their civil wars.”
The book was trailed thus in the NY Times:
Ms. Bloom was 47 when she began her romance with Mr. Roth. In the memoir, the opening scene of their relationship reads like a parody of the daily life of two cultivated New Yorkers, with Mr. Roth on his way to his psychoanalyst, and Ms. Bloom on her way to her yoga class….
But soon there were signs of trouble. Mr. Roth was suspicious and mistrustful, she said, and pressed her to send her daughter elsewhere. In the memoir, Ms. Bloom expresses guilt for having done so. But the real problems began when Mr. Roth had a knee operation, she said, and became addicted to sleeping pills and an anti-anxiety drug. She writes that a terrible depression ensued, and that the couple took refuge on Martha’s Vineyard in the home of their friend William Styron, who has written a moving book about his own depression.
Later, when Mr. Roth wrote ”Deception,” he named the character of the deceived wife ”Claire,” Ms. Bloom writes, changing it only after she begged him to do so. Still, as if teasing his readers, Mr. Roth reserved the name of ”Philip” for the book’s narrator.
In 1999, when the book came up in a John Updike essay about literary biography in The New York Review of Books, Roth wrote to the Editors:
To the Editors:
In your February 4, 1999, issue, John Updike, commenting on Claire Bloom’s 1996 memoir Leaving the Doll’s House, writes: “Claire Bloom, as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, shows him to have been, as their marriage rapidly unraveled, neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” Allow me to imagine a slight revision of this sentence: “Claire Bloom, presenting herself as the wronged ex-wife of Philip Roth, alleges him to have been neurasthenic to the point of hospitalization, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive.” Written thus, the sentence would have had the neutral tone that Mr. Updike is careful to maintain elsewhere in this essay on literary biography when he is addressing Paul Theroux’s characterization of V.S. Naipaul and Joyce Maynard’s characterization of J.D. Salinger. Would that he had maintained that neutral tone in my case as well.
Over the past three years I have become accustomed to finding Miss Bloom’s characterization of me taken at face value. One Sara Nelson, reviewing my novel American Pastoral, digressed long enough to write: “In her memoir, Leaving the Doll’s House, Roth’s ex, Claire Bloom, outed the author as a verbally abusive neurotic, a womanizer, a venal nutcase. Do we believe her? Pretty much:Roth is, after all, the guy who glamorized sex-with-liver in Portnoy’s Complaint.” Mr. Updike offers the same bill of particulars (“neurasthenic…, adulterous, callously selfish, and financially vindictive”) as does Ms. Nelson (“neurotic, a womanizer, a venal nutcase”). Like her, he adduces no evidence other than Miss Bloom’s book. But while I might ignore her in an obscure review on the World Wide Web, I cannot ignore him in a lead essay in The New York Review of Books.
Philip Roth
Cornwall Bridge, Connecticut
John Updike reply was slo printed in the magazine:
Mr. Roth’s imagined revisions sound fine to me, but my own wording conveys, I think, the same sense of one-sided allegations.
In 2012, Roth had more words for the World Wie Web. He wrote an open letter to persuade Wikipedia to let him adjust inaccurate description of his novel The Human Stain. Wikipedia refused to accept him as a credible source.
Dear Wikipedia,
I am Philip Roth. I had reason recently to read for the first time the Wikipedia entry discussing my novel “The Human Stain.” The entry contains a serious misstatement that I would like to ask to have removed. This item entered Wikipedia not from the world of truthfulness but from the babble of literary gossip—there is no truth in it at all.
Yet when, through an official interlocutor, I recently petitioned Wikipedia to delete this misstatement, along with two others, my interlocutor was told by the “English Wikipedia Administrator”—in a letter dated August 25th and addressed to my interlocutor—that I, Roth, was not a credible source: “I understand your point that the author is the greatest authority on their own work,” writes the Wikipedia Administrator—“but we require secondary sources.”
Also in 2012, Roth wrote to the The Atlantic over an essay’s claims that he suffered “a ‘crack-up’ in his mid-50s”.
“The statement is not true nor is there reliable biographical evidence to support it,” wrote Roth at the time. “After knee surgery in March 1987, when I was 54, I was prescribed the sleeping pill Halcion, a sedative hypnotic in the benzodiazepine class of medications that can induce a debilitating cluster of adverse effects … My own adverse reaction to Halcion … started when I began taking the drug and resolved promptly when, with the helpful intervention of my family doctor, I stopped.”
The letters have stopped. But the books remain brilliant.
Spotter: Dangerous Minds, NYRoB
Posted: 23rd, May 2018 | In: Books, Celebrities, News | Comment
Mertesacker outlines his Arsenal vision
Per Mertesacker, Arsenal’s new academy manager, is the German known as the ‘BFG’. He’s written a book. In it he advocates yoga and using both eyes.
…I was a big fan of yoga from the beginning because I had seen that it improved stability and flexibility.
Even at the age of 33 I was one of the most flexible at Arsenal when it came to my back muscles. Hardly anyone came to the yoga sessions that the club offered. Often there were only four of us: Héctor Bellerín, Nacho Monreal and Tomas Rosicky.
The youth players who were promoted to the first team smiled at these exercises. They thought we were meditating. They were happy with the ball at their feet but for everything else there was a lack of desire. “I play football and go to training. That’s enough.”
But no, it isn’t enough when you want to maintain a certain level for a long time or want to improve.
Either you are learning from scratch, from your parents and the teachers and coaches around you, to take responsibility, or you don’t do it at all. This is the kind of dumbing down we must fight against.
The well-rounded Per:
When I injured myself against Sunderland [in the 2011-12 season] I started working with Lars Lienhard. A former athlete, he is a sports scientist as well as a pioneer when it comes to neurally controlled training.
Working with him was a huge success. We always assume that we can run and see properly because nothing hurts. But that is a mistake. Lars showed me that our eyes are a big factor in everything, above all when it comes to our timing.
On my right side my timing was super but I had the feeling my left eye was not really up for it. Why was that? And was it possible to train and improve [the left eye] so that I didn’t have to turn my whole body in order to look left? It all meant that in 50% of the times the ball came towards me my brain said: “Hey, I can’t really see that ball so I’m not going to jump for it.”
And as my left eye was not really looking at the ball I was always twisting my neck to use my dominant right eye.
Football doesn’t really deal with those things, despite the fact they can be decisive. Players would rather lift weights, stand on their own with their dumbbells – but how does that help me on the pitch?
During the exercises with Lars one could see quite clearly that my eyes were moving differently when an object was approaching me. My left eye always remained in the middle rather than focusing on the object.
He showed me how to make my left eye stronger. I had a patch on my right eye, forcing my left eye to focus on the objects. And after a few weeks I could really notice the difference in games. If there was a high ball from the left I had a much better feeling for where it would end up.
With Lars’s help I stayed injury-free for four and a half years. Meeting him changed my life as a footballer.
The important thing was to do exercises myself before games as well to adjust the eyes. One example was a kind of push-up for the eyes. You bring a pencil in towards your nose and force your eyes towards the middle. When you do that at the training ground a lot of people think: “What is he doing now? Is he completely stupid?”
Mainly I was doing it at home or in the hotel room. I had six or seven exercises that I did, sometimes just before kick-off in the dressing room. I didn’t care what the others thought or if they laughed. But you saw again that something new, something unknown, led to laughter rather than people asking: “What are you doing there?”
The Idlers:
Footballers are used to working only three hours a day. And out of the three hours they are at the training ground they are on their mobiles for half of that.
We have all the money in the world but do not realise how important the body is. A player on average has a seven‑year professional career, 10-15 if everything goes right. You have to do everything possible to be at your maximum.
Weltmeister ohne Talent by Per Mertesacker. Via: Guardian.
Posted: 19th, May 2018 | In: Arsenal, Books, Sports | Comment
Action comics Number 1 yours for a bargain $300,001
To the attic in search of a pristine copy of Action Comics #1 (1938). It’s the magazine in which Superman appeared for the first time. On the Heritage Auction website, the top bid sits at an impressive $300k. The auction house hopes the bid will soar to double that figure at its Comics & Comic Art Auction May 10-12 in Chicago:
Form the auction house:
“This auction has a chance to be among the largest comics auctions of all time, if not the largest,” Heritage Auctions Comics Director of Operations Barry Sandoval said. “It will be in a vibrant city that is easy to reach from just about anywhere, and we have an extremely strong collection of valuable comic books that will draw the attention and interest of comics collectors from just about everywhere.”
Action Comics #1 (DC, 1938) CGC VG 4.0 Cream to off-white pages(est. $650,000+) is among the most coveted comic books in the hobby. The issue generates major interest regardless of its condition, and this is one of the highest-graded copies ever offered by Heritage Auctions. Ernst Gerber’s The Photo-Journal Guide to Comic Books rated it “scarce,” and CGC’s census lists just 40 unrestored copies. The first appearance of Superman launched the Golden Age of Comics, and every superhero that followed is in debt to the character created by writer Jerry Siegel and artist Joe Shuster (artist). The issue also sits atop Overstreet’s “Top 100 Golden Age Comics” list.
In 2014, a mint-condition of Action Comics No. 1 sold for a record $3,207,852 in an auction on eBay.
Spotter: Boing Boing, Flashbak
Fire and Fury: Michael Wolfe’s Donald Trump expose is available as a pop-up book
“I’ve made a pop-up easy reader version of Fire and Fury so Donald can see what all the fuss is about,” tweets Happy Toast. The book, by Michael Wolfe, is making waves, accusing Donald Trump of not wanting to become president and being a doofus.
I've made a pop-up easy reader version of Fire and Fury so Donald can see what all the fuss is about pic.twitter.com/xMASZUKjSn
— HappyToast ★ (@IamHappyToast) January 6, 2018
His first days in office pic.twitter.com/xwIa0VBbWs
— HappyToast ★ (@IamHappyToast) January 6, 2018
snacks pic.twitter.com/kFprQ2Cy2L
— HappyToast ★ (@IamHappyToast) January 6, 2018
hairdressing tips pic.twitter.com/aO7KtGkumn
— HappyToast ★ (@IamHappyToast) January 6, 2018
inauguration sads pic.twitter.com/lHGCqxbIUK
— HappyToast ★ (@IamHappyToast) January 6, 2018
new friends pic.twitter.com/weVLJcpgyC
— HappyToast ★ (@IamHappyToast) January 6, 2018
presidential dinners pic.twitter.com/J36h858S2L
— HappyToast ★ (@IamHappyToast) January 6, 2018
and pouring over the best intel a world leader can receive pic.twitter.com/8wDMOTO0jx
— HappyToast ★ (@IamHappyToast) January 6, 2018
Spotter: @IamHappyToast
Posted: 6th, January 2018 | In: Books, Politicians, The Consumer | Comment
William Gass and his hates (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017 )
William Gass (July 30, 1924 – December 6, 2017 ) has words to the wise, telling the Paris Review in 1976
“If someone asks me, ‘Why do you write?’ I can reply by pointing out that it is a very dumb question. Nevertheless, there is an answer. I write because I hate. A lot. Hard. And if someone asks me the inevitable next dumb question, ‘Why do you write the way you do?’ I must answer that I wish to make my hatred acceptable because my hatred is much of me, if not the best part. Writing is a way of making the writer acceptable to the world—every cheap, dumb, nasty thought, every despicable desire, every noble sentiment, every expensive taste.”
Hate has been criminalised. Hate crime. Hate speech. Haters. Hate is bad in the therapeutic age of conformity.
The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump: Ode to 45
Donald Trump’s poetry is composite blend of Tweets, speeches and interviews edited by Rob Sears, who notes the “little known alternative fact that the 45th President, Donald J. Trump, has long been a remarkable poet.”
The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump considers Trump “a modern-day Basho or Larkin” with smaller hands.
The greatest misapprehension about DJT corrected by this volume, however, may be the idea that he sees money and power as ends in themselves. In fact, just as Wilfred Owen turned his wartime experiences into poetry, and Slyvia Plath found the dark beauty in her own depression, Trump is able to transform his unique experiences of being a winner into 24-karat verse. He didn’t build a huge real-estate empire for the billions; he did it so he could write poems…
Highlights:
I won!
Well, we’ve had some disasters, but this is the worst
Bad hombres
I’ve known some bad dudes
I’ve been at parties
They want to do serious harm
I’ve seen and I’ve watched things like with guns
I know a lot of tough guys but they’re not smart
We’re dealing with people like animalsBut they are the folks I like the best—by far!
I am the least racist person there is
I’ve always had a great relationship with the blacks
I remained strong for Tiger Woods during his difficult
period
Oprah, I love Oprah. Oprah would always be my first choice
Kanye West—I love him
I think Eminem is fantastic, and most people think I
wouldn’t like Eminem
And did you know my name is in more black songs than any
other name in hip-hop?
You are the racist, not I
I respect women, I love women, I cherish women
Vagina is expensive
No more apologies—take the offensive!
Hot little girl in high school
I’m a very compassionate person (with a very high IQ)
Just think, in a couple of years I’ll be dating you
It must be a pretty picture, you dropping to your knees
Come here, I’ll show how life works. Please.
We’ve got to stop the stupid
You know what uranium is, right?
It’s a thing called nuclear weapons and other things like lots
of things that are done with uranium including some bad
things
I have to explain this to these people, they don’t even understand basic
physics, basic mathematics, whatever you call it
I mean, they’re like stupid
Look at the way I’ve been treated lately
I should have been TIME Magazine’s Person of the Year
Just like I should have gotten the Emmy for The Apprentice
I should have easily won the Trump University case
I should have won New York state but I didn’t
I unfairly get audited by the I.R.S. almost every
single year
No politician in history—and I say this with great surety—
has been treated worse or more unfairly
Spotter: The Beautiful Poetry of Donald Trump , Dangerous Minds
Posted: 13th, November 2017 | In: Books, Politicians | Comment
Peter Dahmen’s stunning pop-up books
Pop-up books done well are gorgeous. So here’s a peeks at the work of Peter Dahmen and his video Most Satisfying Video of Pop-Up Cards.
Spotter: The Kid Should See This
Posted: 26th, October 2017 | In: Books, Gifs, The Consumer | Comment
A flame-activated edition of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451
The Anne Petronille Nypels Lab at Holland’s Van Eyck Academie showcases the work of French graphic design collective Super Terrain. They’ve created a version of Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 in heat sensitive ink. At room temperature the book’s text is secreted under a layer of black substance. Heat it up and the words are revealed.
Spotter: Open Culture, Flashbak
Posted: 22nd, October 2017 | In: Books, Technology, The Consumer | Comment
