Akopos

What to do with what remains? Salvage. Adapt. Repurpose.

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Brian Dettmer is an American artist who takes old books and turns them into beautiful works of art by cutting away selected parts to reveal layered images and text.

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Artist Mike Stilkey is painting artistic images on the spines of stacked books. His art is called “book sculptures”.

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The art of Nick Georgiou is composed from discarded books and newspapers.

More excellence at Steve McCurry‘s blog.

at Steve McCurry‘s blog:

Fusion: The Synergy of Images and Words

*hat tip to @bookoven

Jason Sanford‘s thoughts on an emerging genre. His list of (possibly) representative works available online is excellent.

at his blog:

The online SciFi Strange anthology

Note: A year ago I first noticed a new trend in science fiction which I called SciFi Strange. Since then I’ve been compiling a list of SciFi Strange stories. Hence this online “anthology.” Please enjoy.

Introduction to SciFi Strange

SciFi Strange isn’t a label. It isn’t a definition.  Instead, it’s an attempt to describe the science fiction being created by some of today’s most exciting writers. These stories combine the literary standards and cultural understandings of the New Wave movement with the basic strangeness and sensawunda from the golden age of science fiction–all seen through the lens of today’s multicultural world, where diversity and difference are the norm even as basic human values and needs still bind us together.

* Online lit mags are publishing some of the most intriguing writing available today. Every Monday, I post a pointer to a site that offers fiction and/or poetry either as free content or as samples from subscriber issues. Today’s pointer is to Annalemma.

I really enjoy this site. It’s visually pleasing, has a clean layout, and publishes quality stories. Subscriptions to printed issues run $20 per year (two issues).

About:

Annalemma Magazine is a literary and arts journal printed biannually and updated weekly online. Founded in 2007 with the expressed mission of engaging as many people as possible in the life-changing experience of telling good stories, Annalemma’s print issues are a lavish celebration of colorful artwork and photography that accompany short stories and essays from writers of all ages, nationalities, disciplines and echelons of the publishing world.

Fiction excerpt:

Stabs at Happiness
I. Fontana

Online chase yields a thin Asian indie-type boy, 23, more and more beautiful the longer Nikki stares at the pixilated blank face.  He goes by Taj but when they agree to meet he signs this email Justin Chen.

Nikki has not had actual sex with a woman here in New York for almost a year, but she’s the sort of not-too-butch young alt dyke who emo girls like to make out with – or be seen making out with – in all kinds of situations these days.  The Club Europa is where dropdead stiletto-heeled Polish, Czech and Ukraine blondes will almost always consent to dance with her, nonstop sleazy techno, smoke machine and zebra-striped dancefloor which tends to metamorphose in a sinister manner when you’re high on a hallucinogen concocted by some dweeb chemistry major who sees experimenting with such variants of Ecstasy as 2c-b and 2c-i as imaginary extra-credit unsanctioned by any oversight committee here on planet earth.

This is so awesome that the risk of getting librarian’s lung would be worth it. Alas, since I don’t have the money or the space (and would have to add a wheelchair lift which might compromise the aesthetics), I’ll be sticking with my iPad.

via Apartment Therapy:

The Two Story, Climb Inside Bookshelf Tower

The Ark, designed by Rintala Eggertsson Architects is a book lovers dream – the ultimate bookshelf, one that you can literally climb inside and spend the day in. Talk about getting lost in a good book!

Pacific University comes in at #4 for Low Residency MFAs.

via Poets & Writers Magazine:

2011 Poets & Writers Magazine Ranking of MFA Programs: A Guide to the Methodology

The 2011 Poets & Writers Magazine MFA rankings are comprised of individual rankings for both full-residency and low-residency programs. The full-residency programs are assessed on the basis of sixteen measures, half of which are in the nature of ordered rankings and half of which are unranked recitations of important program features. All eight of the full-residency rankings-based measures are unscientific, though all eight are predicated upon sufficient hard data to be substantially probative. A scientific ranking of MFA programs is not presently possible, as more than half of the nation’s full- and low-residency programs have thus far declined to make public the necessary data (see below).

James Franco iz in yer culture, doing moar than u.

He’s a movie star. He’s a writer. He appears in a book trailer that’s actually good. He’s the subject of a short story by Ben Percy. And now this:

I first came across John Callahan’s cartoons in one of those magazines covering “The Disability Community”. Wedged between articles on accessible hotels in Prague and glossy ads for titanium framed wheelchairs, they were crudely drawn, cynical… and the absolute truth. He made me laugh and grimace at the same time, his work the necessary antidote for all the rehab happy talk, all the therapists and their “programs”, all the doctors and vocational counselors and misty-eyed Hollywood scriptwriters.

via The Guardian:

John Callahan obituary
Acerbic cartoonist whose work was suffused with angst

Unable to control a pen single-handed, Callahan worked on a tablet on his knees, holding the pen with two hands and drawing from the shoulders. Like that other great humorist, the partially sighted James Thurber, Callahan succeeded in channelling his limitations to create a distinctive style in drawings peopled by characters that he described as “kind of demented, as I think most people are”.

As disability was his primary subject, Callahan frequently came under attack from the people he described as “self-righteous assholes who presume to defend the disabled”, and delighted in publishing these letters on his website.

via Entertainment Weekly:

20 classic last words in books
Parting thoughts that stick with us from Ernest Hemingway, Samuel Beckett, Toni Morrison, Charles Dickens, and more

”The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
—George Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)

I’ll add a twenty-first entry, the conclusion of Moby Dick (a bit of a cheat since a one paragraph epilogue follows, but what the heck):

“and so the bird of heaven, with archangelic shrieks, and his imperial beak thrust upwards, and his whole captive form folded in the flag of Ahab, went down with his ship, which, like Satan, would not sink to hell till she had dragged a living part of heaven along with her, and helmeted herself with it.

Now small fowls flew screaming over the yet yawning gulf; a sullen white surf beat against its steep sides; then all collapsed, and the great shroud of the sea rolled on as it rolled five thousand years ago.”