Kimya Dawson - I Like Giants

Letter from C.S. Lewis to Joan

The Kilns,
Headington Quarry,
Oxford
26 June 1956

Dear Joan–

Thanks for your letter of the 3rd. You describe your Wonderful Night v. well. That is, you describe the place and the people and the night and the feeling of it all, very well — but not the thing itself — the setting but not the jewel. And no wonder! Wordsworth often does just the same. His Prelude (you're bound to read it about 10 years hence. Don't try it now, or you'll only spoil it for later reading) is full of moments in which everything except the thing itself is described. If you become a writer you'll be trying to describe the thing all your life: and lucky if, out of dozens of books, one or two sentences, just for a moment, come near to getting it across.

About amn't I, aren't I and am I not, of course there are no right or wrong answers about language in the sense in which there are right and wrong answers in Arithmetic. "Good English" is whatever educated people talk; so that what is good in one place or time would not be so in another. Amn't I was good 50 years ago in the North of Ireland where I was brought up, but bad in Southern England. Aren't I would have been hideously bad in Ireland but very good in England. And of course I just don't know which (if either) is good in modern Florida. Don't take any notice of teachers and textbooks in such matters. Nor of logic. It is good to say "more than one passenger was hurt," although more than one equals at least two and therefore logically the verb ought to be plural were not singular was!

What really matters is:– 

1. Always try to use the language so as to make quite clear what you mean and make sure your sentence couldn't mean anything else.

2. Always prefer the plain direct word to the long, vague one. Don'timplement promises, but keep them.

3. Never use abstract nouns when concrete ones will do. If you mean "More people died" don't say "Mortality rose."

4. In writing. Don't use adjectives which merely tell us how you want us to feel about the thing you are describing. I mean, instead of telling us a thing was "terrible," describe it so that we'll be terrified. Don't say it was "delightful"; make us say "delightful" when we've read the description. You see, all those words (horrifying, wonderful, hideous, exquisite) are only like saying to your readers, "Please will you do my job for me."

5. Don't use words too big for the subject. Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite.

Thanks for the photos. You and Aslan both look v. well. I hope you'll like your new home.

With love
yours
C.S. Lewis

http://www.lettersofnote.com/2012/04/c-s-lewis-on-writing.html

Moldy Peaches - Nothing Came Out

Lovely costumes for life

http://designerimposter.tumblr.com/

Book covers and latin proverbs

http://pinterest.com/cameronbarry/books-covers/
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Latin_proverbs

talk i would like to attend

http://centerforthehumanities.org/events/Translit-or-The-Historical-Novel-Now

Oct 10, 2012, 6:30pm | Room C204/C205

Translit, or The Historical Novel Now

Ashley Dawson, Hari Kunzru, Peter Mendelsund

Contemporary novels often cross history without being historical, and collapse time and space without a corresponding shift in point of view. Has a new genre emerged? How does the use of history in contemporary literature reflect popular attitudes toward current political and economic events? And how—if at all—does this tendency bear on the way in which publishing itself is fast-becoming historical? Join novelist Hari Kunzru as he speaks with artists and scholars about these questions and others.

Co-sponsored by the PhD Program in English

On why we can't imagine strong pain or suffering, time heals all, dulls all

***

When reading To the Lighthouse you come across this sentence:

“…While it drew from the long frilled strips of seaweed pinned to the wall a smell of salt and weeds…”

Can you smell this odor? When I read this passaged I imagined I did. Of course what I was “smelling” was the idea of a smell. Not something visceral like a real smell. Can we imagine smells? I posed this question to a neuroscientist, an expert in how the brain constructs “smell”:

I have not met the person who can convincingly tell you that they can recreate peppermint, or lilac at will and with … immediacy.  I myself cannot, but can force a small fragment of the experience in an almost intellectual way—not the visceral experience…Why is this? I think that smell…has a more primitive, somatic nature: you cannot create the qualities of intense pain or itch in your mind and feel them with any intensity either. Perhaps this is because smell is a primitive stimulus …  in some ways, the more primitive sensations are more important to survival.  The body does not want you to create the experience of smelling danger or food or a mate ex nihilo unless they are actually present- it costs to act and false alarms can lead to problems.

When we imagine, our experiences of sensations are dulled, so as to distinguish these imagined senses from real cues. We “force” an experience in “an almost intellectual way.”

What interests me here is that most people believe that they can imagine smells perfectly; viscerally. Or, while they are reading, they tell themselves that they have smelled something. (Like my idealized piano playing, there are no wrong notes. We have read a book—that is to say: imagined it—perfectly).

The smell of “salt and weeds:”

I am not smelling them: I am performing a synesthetic transformation. From the words “smell of salt and weeds” I am calling up an idea of that Cape Cod house I rent. The experience does not contain any true recall of an odor. It is a flash, which leaves a slight after-image. It is spectral and mutating. An aurora. A nebula of illusory material.

http://jacketmechanical.blogspot.com/

Kafka Book Jackets

Kafka

Whenever I'm asked (and I'm asked with some frequency) which authors I'd most like to design jackets for, I always say Kafka (I mention others too, but Kafka is usually the first to spring to my mind).

There's just something about Kafka- and this something is so very hard to pin down...

After all, what is it that makes Kafka, Kafka? The economy; the dark humor; the teasing inscrutability; the brilliance of the thought-experiments; the hieratic and esoteric flavor of the constructions; the disorienting cadence of the prose; the impeccable, internal, magical logic that drives the mechanical toy theaters of his work; the much discussed Jewishness (as if this was easy to parse); the "concrete abstractions" (in the words of Zadie Smith).... I suppose what some find most relevant and compelling in Kafka is his ability to inspire in them that paradoxical feeling that great literature always aspires to arouse in readers—the feeling of the universality of their own alienation. Kafka is the ne plus ultra of alienation- alienation being arguably the defining emotional condition of the 20th century.

Maybe loving Kafka means no more than admiring his downright peculiarity...he is just so anomalous and extraordinary a writer, so particular in his assets, so without precursor (despite what Borges would have us believe). Me, well, as the saying goes: I love that he makes me laugh. But I will get to humor later.

I had been periodically thinking about a Kafka redesign, but actually began work on the project in earnest when I officially took over the art directing duties over at Pantheon a month ago or so (I'm still the associate art director at Knopf, and, some other new things as well...busy times).

Schocken, which is part of Pantheon Books, has a long and storied relationship with Kafka.

Salman Schocken acquired the world rights to Kafka's works from no less than Max Brod himself in the thirties. Schocken (being a Jewish press, publishing books exclusively for, and by Jews) was exempted from the aryanization of the more generalized German presses, and thus was the first publisher to achieve wide scale distribution of Kafka in Germany. Later, during the war, Schocken published Kafka in its new home in Palestine (in Hebrew), and subsequently, when Schocken opened shop in New York in 1940, Kafka's works were put out in English translation in addition to the German editions Schocken was still publishing.

As it turns out, some of the Kafka rights had been sold in the intervening years, and Schocken was put in the position of having to reacquire them. Writes Pantheon managing editor and Schocken Editorial Director Altie Karper when asked if Kafka was on Pantheon's first list seventy years ago:
"Interestingly enough, no, because Salman Schocken had licensed the rights to The Trial to none other than Alfred A. Knopf* back in the mid-1930s, when Schocken was still in Berlin and could not have imagined that he would wind up publishing books in English in America. It took him (Salman Schocken) quite some time to wrest the English-language rights back from Alfred when he arrived here and started publishing in 1945.

(There is a) hysterically funny series of interoffice memos between then-Schocken-editor Hannah Arendt and publisher Salman Schocken, wherein Arendt flatly states that if Schocken wants those Kafka rights back from Alfred he'd going to have to jolly well get on the phone and speak to The Great Man himself, because Alfred considers her too low down on the totem pole to discuss the matter with her, and refuses to reply to her letters or return her phone calls."

Ms. Karper tells me she has in her possession the document, signed by Hannah Arendt, that gives Schocken the rights back "for a nominal amount of money." Needless to say, I am excited to see this document- and, as an aside, I hope to redesign the Hannah Arendt backlist as well some day.

* * * * *

"Though during his lifetime he could not make a decent living, he will now keep generations of intellectuals both gainfully employed and well-fed"

—Hannah Arendt

The design:

So, as you can see, I've gone with eyes here (not the first or last time I will use an eye as a device on a jacket-book covers are, after all, faces, both literally and figuratively, of the books they wrap). I find eyes, taken in the singular, create intimacy, and in the plural instill paranoia. This seemed a good combo for Kafka- who is so very adept at the portrayal of the individual, as well as the portrayal of the persecution of the individual.


I also opted for color. It needs saying that Kafka's books are, among other things, funny, sentimental, and in their own way, yea-saying. I am so weary of the serious Kafka, the pessimist Kafka. Kafkaesque has become synonymous with the machinations of anonymous bureaucracy- but, of course, Kafka was a satirist (ironist, exaggerator) of the bureaucratic, and not an organ of it. Because of this mischaracterization, Kafka's books have a tendency to be jacketed in either black, or in some combination of colors I associate with socialist realism, constructivism, or fascism- i.e. black, beige and red. Part of the purpose of this project for me, was to let some of the sunlight back in. In any case, hopefully these colors, though bright, are not without tension.

The typography. The script is an amalgam of Kafka's own hand, and a wonderfully versatile typeface called "Mister K" (based on Kafka's own hand) by Julia Sysmäläine who works at Edenspiekermann in Berlin.

These editions will begin coming out in June and July- they are all paperbacks, with maybe a couple in hardcover as well- time will tell. I'm hoping we can do a box set for them after they all come out (which is already designed- and which has the complete parable "Before the Law" printed on the inside.)


As a final side note- as you can tell from looking at one of the spines from these new editions, there's a new Schocken logo (as well as a bunch of new Pantheon logos- more on these tk) This one springing directly out of this Kafka project:

Well, I hope you enjoy these- there are more updates, with more new book jackets, coming to the blog soon (I know, I keep promising- it's just that I have NO TIME!)

*Pantheon and Schocken are now imprints of Alfred A Knopf (which is a subsidiary of Random house, which is owned by Bertelsmann, which brings us, by commodius vicus of recirculation, back to German publishing and the Jews, but more on that some other day.)

Postscript!

Here's an interesting piece of ephemera, also involving Schocken, Hannah Arendt, and Kafka- this is the letter in which Arendt has Mr. Schocken personally take on the "Kafka Kerfuffle" (as I am now calling it) because, once again, the person in question (Kurt Wolff!) doesn't want to do business with her, a mere editor (and one suspects, a mere woman as well). In this case, the dealings are with New Directions for the rights to, I believe, Amerika (remember Alvin Lustig's cover?)

from http://jacketmechanical.blogspot.com/2011/01/kafka.html  by

lyre underworld Orpheus