One: Stephen Elliott reports from Book Expo America, and makes any number of good points.
Two: Via Warren Ellis: the launch of The 5Lights Project, in which one story will be told per week, each day via a different medium. Which sounds like a genius idea, and one that bears watching.
Three: Speaking of Mr. Ellis: today marks the launch of his new column on comics, Do Anything. In which Jack Kirby is invoked, via a robotic head.
Warren Ellis on Anthony Braxton. Which, among other things, makes some fine points about what artists in one discipline can learn from the theories of another.
Two new reviews up at Lit Mob as of today: Achewood: The Great Outdoor Fight by Chris Onstad, and Doktor Sleepless: Engines of Desire by Warren Ellis and Ivan Rodriguez. I’ll have some thoughts in this space later this week on Doktor Sleepless‘s run since then.
One: Asta In the Wings author Jan Elizabeth Watson assembles a playlist for Largehearted Boy.
Two: Simon Reynolds on zines. [via Warren Ellis]
Three: John Siracusa on digital publishing. [via The Book Oven]
This last one merits some qualification, as I don’t agree with all of Siracusa’s conclusions or his central metaphor. (There was a good debate happening in the comments section when last I checked.) I do think he makes two spot-on points, though: the first being that people are far more likely to purchase and read books digitally using an existing device as opposed to purchasing something specifically designed for that purpose. The other has more to do with semantics: the fact that an album is an album, regardless of whether the format is LP, CD, or MP3; yet a digital book has the “e-book” tag.
Following up on my post on PaperCamp, which in turn referenced some of Ellis’s earlier posts on the subject: Warren Ellis further discusses the concept. And it’s — as you might expect, from someone familiar with both printed and online ways to tell stories and spread information — an intelligent look at multiple sides of the issue.
At HTML Giant, Jimmy Chen looks at Issuu’s method for displaying text, which — to these eyes — essentially looks like figuring out a way to mimic the action of holding a magazine open in the online space. This is something I’ve seen used a fair amount of places, including by publications I like, and I’m a little baffled by it. I like reading articles in magazines; I like reading articles online. I can argue the pros and cons of each, but — more importantly — I think the critical thing is determining what the best way is to display those articles. I’d tend to argue that using one kind of media to mimic the properties of another leaves you with a hybrid that loses the advantages of each.
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In a similar vein — Warren Ellis today directed readers to his earlier coverage of the Papernet, to Matt Jones’s announcement of the PaperCamp conference, and to Jeremy Keith’s coverage of the same. There’s a lot to take in here — half the reason I’m posting all of these links is so that I’ll have them all in a handy place — but given the growing theme in granularity in publishing (the Emerging Writers Network has had a lot of recent coverage of limited-run chapbooks, for instance) and publishers bridging the gap between online and printed work, this definitely seems like the beginning of something significant.
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It’s deeply frustrating to read “the future of publishing” pieces that tend to focus on an entirely digital future for books. Mainly because — for me — there seems to be a general “digital is always better” mentality that doesn’t always make sense. Does a perennially updated digital work make sense in some cases? Sure. But there seems to be a call for a singular format even as we evolve the ability to present work in a host of different forms, and at times it seems like a rush to standardize may deprive works from being presented in what might be their ideal format.
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Update: looks like the next PaperCamp will happen in Cohoes, New York in around two weeks.
Last month, I picked up Aetheric Mechanics, a graphic novella from writer Warren Ellis and penciler Gianluca Pagliarani. I read it within a few weeks of Neil Gaiman’s “A Study In Emerald”, and some comparisons are inevitable: Gaiman and Ellis are both writers who work in multiple disciplines (starting from comics and moving into novels and screenplays), and each of their stories could be described as a Sherlock Holmes pastiche. (In the case of Ellis’s, the elevator pitch would be “Holmes gone steampunk”; for Gaiman’s, “Holmes meets Lovecraft”.) I say “could be”, though, because neither one stops there. To go into exactly how would, I’d say, spoil chunks of the plot for each, and both are plotted tightly enough that their structure only comes into full view upon the story’s conclusion.
Aetheric Mechanics takes as its starting point the arrival of its narrator in London, 1907; four pages in, he boards what can only be described as a flying platform, and it’s plainly clear that this 1907 is not the one we know. The narrative likewise blends elements familiar to anyone who’s read Arthur Conan Doyle’s Holmes stories with more jarring moments, as elements that might have seemed familiar are reimagined in a slightly but significantly altered context — all of which build until the story, and its central mystery, reach its conclusion. It’s a solid, nicely paced work, giving equal space to a sense of wonder and the gut-wrenching instability on its flip side.
One aside: between this and the Mountain Goats’ Heretic Pride, Sax Rohmer is having a banner year as cultural reference points go.