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Tag: books

  • Modern magic unlocks Merlin’s medieval secrets – University of Cambridge

    Afragile 13th century manuscript fragment, hidden in plain sight as the binding of a 16th-century archival register, has been discovered in Cambridge and revealed to contain rare medieval stories of Merlin and King Arthur. The manuscript, first discovered at Cambridge University Library in 2019, has now been identified as part of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, a French-language sequel to the legend of King Arthur. The story was part of the Lancelot-Grail cycle, a medieval best seller but few now remain. There are less than 40 surviving manuscripts of the Suite Vulgate du Merlin, with each one unique since they were individually handwritten by medieval scribes. This latest discovery has been identified as having been written between 1275 and 1315.

    The manuscript had survived the centuries after being recycled and repurposed in the 1500s as the cover for a property record from Huntingfield Manor in Suffolk, owned by the Vanneck family of Heveningham. It meant the remarkable discovery was folded, torn, and even stitched into the binding of the book – making it almost impossible for Cambridge experts to access it, read it, or confirm its origins. What followed the discovery has been a ground-breaking collaborative project, showcasing the work of the University Library’s Cultural Heritage Imaging Laboratory (CHIL) and combining historical scholarship with cutting-edge digital techniques, to unlock the manuscript’s long-held secrets – without damaging the unique document.

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  • Chaos bewitched: Moby-Dick and AI – The Public Domain Review

    Each of these seemed to me “a boggy, soggy, squitchy picture truly”. And indeed of any of them I might be tempted to cry out something along the lines of, “It’s the Black Sea in a midnight gale!” or, “It’s the unnatural combat of the four primal elements!” Or perhaps even, “It’s a Hyperborean winter scene! It’s the breaking-up of the icebound stream of Time!” Further iteration was called for. The middle version possessed, to my eye, a dark central form of peculiarly leviathanic nebulosity. Onward!

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  • The first AI bookmark for physical readers – Mark

    Unlock your intellectual potential. Introducing Mark 1, the physical bookmark that tracks and summarizes the pages you read. … Designed to integrate effortlessly into your reading routine, Mark enhances your experience without disrupting your flow.

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  • 1970s sci-fi book covers by fab1an – glif

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  • Can we still recover the right to be left alone? – The Nation

    “Surely we are correct to think that we have, or ought to have, moral and legal rights to exercise control over such information and to protect us from the harms that can ensue when it falls in the wrong hands,” Pressly writes. But to treat that as the end of the debate is to accept the terms set by the state and capital. Rather, he maintains, “privacy is valuable not because it empowers us to exercise control over our information, but because it protects against the creation of such information.” We now assume that Mayer’s experiment in data-gathering has been perfected, that all of human life has become information hoovered up by our own devices. Pressly argues that this assumption is incorrect—and that to the extent that it is true, such a state of affairs must be resisted in order for our debates about privacy to have any meaning at all.

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  • What is it like to be a bass? Fish-eye view photography (1919–22) – The Public Domain Review

    In a series of publications spanning the 1910s and 1920s, anglers attempted to crack the puzzle of fishing — what makes a fish bite, or not — through photography. Fisherman-scientists experimented with the cameras of their day to capture the world as seen from the fish’s eye. They created above-ground observation tanks, cordoned off sections of streams, and submerged “periscope”-like devices encased in glass. They grappled with dilemmas of distortion and refraction. Ultimately, the images they produced — of flies (real and fake) suspended on the water’s surface, of fishing line, and sometimes even of the photographers themselves — have their own avant-garde quality. These photos are an exercise in cross-species empathy: they are an effort to enter the mind of the fish through the lens of the camera.

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  • The drift of things: David Goodman Croly’s Glimpses of the Future (1888) – The Public Domain Review

    And some of the predictions do seem truly oracular, especially for a person writing in 1888. In terms of politics, Sir Oracle worries about “the accumulation of wealth in a few hands”, how “the middle class . . . will become reduced in numbers”, and a coming era when “there will be no more cheap land”. He suspects that “California is destined to have a dense population”; he believes that the US will soon annex Hawai‘i. He fears Germany above all other nations and speaks of “the coming international war”. In terms of foreign policy, he predicts that “the United States will some day take its place among the nations as a great power in international questions”; domestically, he worries that the postal service will be treated as a for-profit venture, when it should really operate as a public service. He foresees the successful opening of a Panama Canal, suspects that “the drift of things is towards the emancipation of women”, and worries that daily newspapers will be absorbed into journalistic monopolies. He augurs that the jet-setting age will soon be upon us: “If the aerostat should become as cheap for travellers as the sailing vessel, why may not man become migratory, like the birds, occupying the more mountainous regions and sea-coast in summer and more tropical climes in winter.” On the relation of the sexes, he laments — despite the civilizational benefits of monogamous marriage — that “we have promiscuity, polyandry, and polygamy right here in New York”, and suspects that these practices may one day become more socially tolerated. He has no time for one Mr. Fanciful, who suggests that narcotics akin to opium, nitrous oxide, and cocaine could one day allow us to actively control our dreams, and thus prevent a third of one’s life being lost to unproductive sleep.

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  • Apocalypse later: How the world used to end – Parapraxis

    But it’s that small narrative pivot, from scenes of fiery ruin to an atmosphere of simmering expectation, that invests all these homely details with a creeping nightmarishness. Not that the temperature of the prose ever once rises; conspicuously, it does not. The characters each and all comport themselves with mildness and a distinctly Anglophilic style of polite restraint, like guests soldiering through a stilted garden party. All is strangely unemphatic. There is no high drama, no keening in the face of coming annihilation.

    Instead, On the Beach immerses us in the secular mundanity of ordinary lives, and the cumulative effect of this is potent and eerie. This world, the character world of the novel, turns out to be brimming with figures who are, in an odd and insinuating way, near to us indeed. For these are people for whom what had been a menacing prospect, a likelihood even, has with an almost imperceptible shift been transformed into an irrevocable certainty. And that’s On the Beach: a sustained fiction in which those two cataclysmically different states—anxious expectation, blighted certitude—converge toward an awful vanishing point.

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  • The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning by Margareta Magnusson – Simon & Schuster

    In Sweden there is a kind of decluttering called döstädning, dö meaning “death” and städning meaning “cleaning.” This surprising and invigorating process of clearing out unnecessary belongings can be undertaken at any age or life stage but should be done sooner than later, before others have to do it for you. In The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning, artist Margareta Magnusson, with Scandinavian humor and wisdom, instructs readers to embrace minimalism. Her radical and joyous method for putting things in order helps families broach sensitive conversations, and makes the process uplifting rather than overwhelming.

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  • An exhibition of non-existent books – Hyperallergic

    Created by a team of artists, printers, bookbinders, and calligraphers, these books don’t belong to the real world, at least not in the traditional sense. They can be “lost” or “unfinished,” both of which apply to Sylvia Plath’s Double Exposure (1964/2024?), a semi-autobiographical novel about a wife with an awful husband, the manuscript of which was possibly destroyed by her awful real-life husband, Ted Hughes. The existence of this book here, with its cover of a doubled Plath beneath a serifed title and published by the actual Heinemann company, suggests an alternate and more kind reality in which Plath did not die by suicide, and her manuscript had not vanished. Or they are books that never existed at all, except in the worlds conjured in other works of fiction, such as “The Garden of Forking Paths,” mentioned in a Jorge Luis Borges collection fittingly entitled Fictions (1944).

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  • A life nearly wrecked — and then rescued — by books – The Washington Post

    What could such an enviously exacting stylist find so horrifying about the written word? The bibliophobia of the title, Chihaya assures us, only “occasionally manifests as an acute, literal fear of books.” More often, it “develops as a generalized anxiety about reading in patients who have previously experienced profound — perhaps too profound — attachments to books and literature.”

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  • AI-Generated slop is already in your public library – 404 Media

    Low quality books that appear to be AI generated are making their way into public libraries via their digital catalogs, forcing librarians who are already understaffed to either sort through a functionally infinite number of books to determine what is written by humans and what is generated by AI, or to spend taxpayer dollars to provide patrons with information they don’t realize is AI-generated. […]

    It is impossible to say exactly how many AI-generated books are included in Hoopla’s catalog, but books that appeared to be AI-generated were not hard to find for most of the search terms I tried on the platform. There’s a book about AI Monetization of Your Faceless YouTube Channel, or “AI Moniiziization,” as it says on its AI-generated cover. Searching for “Elon Musk” led me to this book for “inspiring quotes, fun facts, fascinating trivia, and surprising insights of the technoking.” The book’s cover is AI-generated, its content also appears to be AI-generated, and it was authored by Bill Tarino, another author with no real online footprint who has written around 40 books in the past year about a wide range of subjects including Taylor Swift, emotional intelligence, horror novels, and practical home security.

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  • Who can save us from social media? At this point, perhaps just us – The Harvard Gazette

    The boldest and most creative of social media’s would-be reformers, a small group of legal scholars and other academics, joined by a handful of rebel programmers, have a more radical plan. They call it frictional design. They believe the existing technological system needs to be dismantled and rebuilt in a more humanistic form. Pursuing an approach reminiscent of the machine-breaking strategy of the 19th-century British Luddites, if without the violence, they seek, in effect, to sabotage existing social media platforms by reintroducing friction into their operations — throwing virtual sand into the virtual works.

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  • The case for kicking the stone – Los Angeles Review of Books

    The central problem, however, is that an onslaught of information—of everything, all at once—flattens all sense of proportion. When Zuckerberg said to his staff that “a squirrel dying in front of your house may be more relevant to your interests right now than people dying in Africa,” it’s not that his tone-deaf observation was untrue but that, as Carr says, he was making a category error, equating two things that cannot be compared. Yet “social media renders category errors obsolete because it renders categories obsolete. All information belongs to a single category—it’s all ‘content.’” And very often, the content that matters is decided in the currency of commerce: content is “bad” when it harms profits.

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  • How an AI-written book shows why the tech ‘terrifies’ creatives – BBC News

    There is currently no barrier to anyone creating one in anybody’s name, including celebrities – although Mr Mashiach says there are guardrails around abusive content. Each book contains a printed disclaimer stating that it is fictional, created by AI, and designed “solely to bring humour and joy”. Legally, the copyright belongs to the firm, but Mr Mashiach stresses that the product is intended as a “personalised gag gift”, and the books do not get sold further.

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  • “Relaxations for the Impotent”: Ben Hecht’s Fantazius Mallare and the contradictions of American smut – Public Domain Review

    Perhaps one of the reasons Fantazius Mallare failed was that it did not seem to deliver on its transgressive mission. Among the few who agreed to review the book was D. H. Lawrence, himself no stranger to courting controversy and running afoul of censorship laws. But Lawrence found the novel to be utterly lacking. “I’m sorry”, he wrote, “it didn’t thrill me a bit, neither the pictures nor the text. It all seems to me so would-be. . . . And really, Fantasius, with his head full of copulation and committing mental fornication and sodomy every minute, is just as much a bore as any other tedious modern individual with a dominant idea.” Dismissive of the whole enterprise, Lawrence offered an improved subtitle for the book: “Relaxations for the Impotent”.

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  • Better without AI

    Better without AI explores moderate apocalypses that could result from current and near-future AI technology. These are relatively overlooked risks: not extreme sci-fi extinction scenarios, nor the media’s obsession with “ChatGPT said something naughty” trivia. Rather: realistically likely disasters, up to the scale of our history’s worst wars and oppressions. Better without AI suggests seven types of actions you, and all of us, can take to guard against such catastrophes—and to steer us toward a future we would like.

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  • Selling the collective: On Kevin Killian’s “Selected Amazon Reviews” – Cleveland Review of Books

    In 2021, writer Will Hall began scraping Kevin Killian’s reviews from Amazon’s servers and, thanks largely to his efforts, Semiotext(e) published Kevin Killian: Selected Amazon Reviews in November. The 697-page collection rescues from obscurity some of the over two thousand reviews the poet, playwright, novelist, biographer, editor, critic, and artist posted to the platform from 2003 until his death in 2019.

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  • Elegance and hustle – Aeon Essays

    “Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity. And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.” […]

    But French writers’ loathing of journalism was underlain by a fundamental tension: those who criticised the press most vehemently were themselves journalists, and their novels of journalism were typically published in the same newspapers they excoriated. Journalism and literature were so deeply entwined that newspapers became ‘the laboratory of literature’ throughout the long 19th century, generating new literary forms, such as prose poetry and the serial novel.

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  • Glorious Trash

    Trawling the depths of forgotten fiction, films, and beyond, with yer pal, Joe Kenney.

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  • January 1, 2025 is Public Domain Day: Works from 1929 are open to all, as are sound recordings from 1924 – Duke University School of Law

    On January 1, 2025, thousands of copyrighted works from 1929 will enter the US public domain, along with sound recordings from 1924. They will be free for all to copy, share, and build upon.[2] 2025 marks a milestone: all of the books, films, songs, and art published in the 1920s will now be public domain. The literary highlights from 1929 include The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner, A Farewell to Arms by Ernest Hemingway, and A Room of One’s Own by Virginia Woolf. In film, Mickey Mouse speaks his first words, the Marx Brothers star in their first feature film, and legendary directors from Alfred Hitchcock to John Ford made their first sound films. From comic strips, the original Popeye and Tintin characters will enter the public domain. Among the newly public domain compositions are Gershwin’s An American in Paris, Ravel’s Bolero, Fats Waller’s Ain’t Misbehavin’, and the musical number Singin’ in the Rain.

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  • Download 200+ free modern art books from the Guggenheim Museum – Open Culture

    Among the more than 200 Guggenheim art books available on the Internet Archive, you’ll find one on a 1977 retrospective of Color Field painter Kenneth Noland, one on the ever-vivid icon-making pop artist Roy Lichtenstein, and one on the existential slogans — “MONEY CREATES TASTE,” “PROTECT ME FROM WHAT I WANT,” “LACK OF CHARISMA CAN BE FATAL” — slyly, digitally inserted into the lives of thousands by Jenny Holzer. Other titles, like Expressionism, a German Intuition 1905–1920, From van Gogh to Picasso, from Kandinsky to Pollock, and painter Wassily Kandinsky’s own Point and Line to Plane, go deeper into art history.

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  • The 30 best art books of 2024 – Hyperallergic

    By recontextualizing the Renaissance in downright gothic terms, Bosch becomes the primogeniture of an alternative school of the period that is marked by the monstrous as much as the humanistic. Aikema and Cremades’s argument isn’t a boring rehash of the Northern versus the Italian Renaissance debate. This alternative school isn’t marked by geography as much as it is by perspective, so that Giuseppe Arcimboldo joins Netherlandish counterparts like Pieter Brueghel in their turn towards the bizarre.

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  • The one hundred pages strategy – The Lamp Magazine

    The most common question I have received regarding the hundred pages strategy is, of course, How do you do it? This has proven more difficult to answer than I thought it would. While I have chosen to refer to it as a “strategy,” the truth is that most of it, including the page target itself, is really something more like a post-hoc attempt at systematizing my own habits; I did not wake up one day as an infrequent reader and work slowly towards one hundred pages a day out of some inchoate desire for self-improvement. Rather, like many of us, I decided some years ago that if I did not take it upon myself to spend less time scrolling through Wikipedia or the AllMusic Guide or returning to my Twitter “feed”—the implicit image of a trough is appropriate—I would find myself losing one of my greatest pleasures to sheer indolence.

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  • Kafka’s screwball tragedy: Investigations of a Philosophical Dog – The MIT Press Reader

    “Investigations of a Dog” is a funny and deeply philosophical tale of a lone, maladjusted dog who defies scientific dogma and pioneers an original research program in pursuit of the mysteries of his self and his world.

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  • 100 of the Best Book Covers of 2024 – PRINT Magazine

    Here’s to all the striking book covers in 2024! There has truly never been a better time to get lost in a book—or a book cover.

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  • “Here I gather all the friends”: Machiavelli and the emergence of the private study – The Public Domain Review

    Reading is a form of necromancy, a way to summon and commune once again with the dead, but in what ersatz temple should such a ritual take place? Andrew Hui tracks the rise of the private study by revisiting the bibliographic imaginations of Machiavelli, Montaigne, and W. E. B. Du Bois, and finds a space where words mediate the world and the self.

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  • The Necronomicon – Propnomicon

    After spending half an evening, this came out, and while I found it funny in a ridiculous way, I also realized this is probably so specific as to be funny only to a very specific intersection of demographics. I present, Penguin books’ post-war publication of The Necronomicon, well typeset and affordable for the common man. (I was pondering for a bit whether it would rather be a Penguin Classic, but the idea of the book of unspeakable horrors as an inexpensive nonfiction publication for a broad audience seemed way funnier.)

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  • Booker Prize is awarded to Samantha Harvey’s ‘Orbital’ – The New York Times

    Harvey has said that while writing the novel she continually watched streaming video from the International Space Station showing Earth from space. “To look at the Earth from space was a bit like a child looking into a mirror and realizing for the first time that the person in the mirror is herself,” she said during her acceptance speech.

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  • All about the outcome – Archive Today: London Review of Books

    Conventional wisdom holds that Labour tacks left after periods in government, when it prioritises socialist ideology, and then right after election defeats, which compel the party to reprioritise electoral strategy. A recent paper by Michael Jacobs and Andrew Hindmoor, from Sheffield’s Political Economy Research Institute, suggests that this is misguided: Labour moves right when the economy is doing well and there’s money to spend, then left when the economy looks to be in crisis and structural reform is needed. Structural reform is certainly needed today. Starmer and his chancellor, Rachel Reeves, will need to draw deeply from the reserve of new ideas to make the big changes necessary. Reeves has already made what the Financial Times called a ‘moderately radical’ move, indicating in advance of the budget that while she will ensure national debt falls, she’ll change the measure of debt she targets, allowing more government borrowing where it’s for investment rather than day-to-day spending. Labour’s first hundred days in office were dogged by controversies over ending the Winter Fuel Payment, the acceptance of gifts of clothes and glasses, and squabbles in No. 10. But the budget and next year’s spending review will show us what Starmer’s Labour Party is really made of. Barnier recalls that when he worked opposite him, Starmer was ‘always learning. He improved, day after day, year after year.’ Let’s hope so.

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