Wei to go!

Jing Wei has been chosen by PRINT magazine as one of the 20 best illustrators under 30!

(Look for her art on the cover of Jane Yeh's new book of poetry, The Ninjas, later this year.)

*

In other news, up to 500 bees will surround an invading hornet and cook it to death.

Eye candy

This is just fun to look at.

(Via Jing Wei)

The actual sequence

I. Sam Tanenhaus on Daniel Bell:

In this sense Bell was heir to the vanishing tradition of systematizers or master builders — Hegel and Marx, Durkheim and Weber, Freud and Nietzsche, Dewey and Veblen. All were required reading for the mid-20th-­century intellectual. But Bell seemed to regard them as rivals. He had digested even their most obscure writings and was not afraid to anatomize and correct them, fussily at times. His footnotes betray a hint of George Eliot’s pedant Casaubon: “Quotations have been transposed to compress and strengthen Schumpeter’s description. The actual sequence of quotations is: pp. 137, 147, 151, 147, 145, 154.” —NYT Book Review

II. This hair-raising story had a primo "Dizzies" moment:

The breakthrough occurred about 8:30 a.m., when two witnesses reported seeing Mr. Gelman on a southbound No. 1 train between 137th and 96th Streets in Manhattan. One called 911. The other, a woman, was reading a newspaper when a man, apparently Mr. Gelman, moved close.

Mr. Kelly related, “He knocks the paper out of her hand and says, ‘Do you believe what they’re writing about me?’ ” —NYT

III. I went to hear Nicholson Baker speak at Columbia last Thursday; among the many gems was this bit, on Dick Francis, which I then related to Jenny (the only Franciscan I know).

IV. At Desert Island in Brooklyn: a window display by Jing Wei:

Echidnas in repose

Jing Wei's Post-It art features the most appealing/hypnotic dumpling ever conceived:



NSFW: Jingian triptych as tattoo??

Process

Jing Wei!

It eventually makes this:

American Wei

Jing Wei—greatest artist of all time? (The above is for American Way magazine, which used to have the best Editor's Notes.) Her work is also in McSweeney's new San Francisco Panorama broadside, which is apparently flying off the stands so fast that I will never see a copy!

Yak attack

Paths Less Traveled, featuring N-Y Ghost artist Jing Wei and three others, is up at Giant Robot in NYC beginning today!

Buggin' out

Worth getting Cincinnati Magazine to see Jing Wei's critters as trading cards?

(Pictured above: bedbug, mit refreshments.)

Disambiguations™ for October 1, 2009

I. October Believer is out! A sorta "travel issue": Avi Davis on Dracula and tourism; August Kleinzahler on Alaska; Ginger Strand and James Wallenstein on Cuba; J.C. Hallman on the history of cruise ships...plus Jonathan Ames interviewed, Sheila Heti talking to Agnès Varda, Jack Pendarvis's "Musin's and Thinkin's" Southernish humor column, and more! (Derek Walcott poem... Stephen Burt poetry review...Greil Marcus as always...Regional fast-food chart from Lincoln Michel...still more...including EYE-POPPING interior art by JING WEI!)

II. Amber Tamblyn is blogging at the Poetry Foundation's Harriet?! It's kind of amazing:

"Look at you, spell-checking the word ‘aficionado’ and correcting it. You can’t even spell. You’re a Hollywood actress who can’t spell, who doesn’t even live in Hollywood but none the less that’s what you are, because I am your subconscious and I say so."

III. I'm astonished—or maybe I'm not??—that there's no Nabokov love in the comments at Paper Cuts (vis-à-vis Rosenbaum/Laura/Slate) in fact there's no mention of Nabokov at all.

IV. Thanks to all who came out to the reading last night — that was a lot of fun!

Disambiguations™ for August 26, 2009

I.
Just a bit more on the Invisible Library and the I.L. exhibit at Poets & Writers and on the American Short Fiction blog...

II.
From an old Light Reading post:

Amy Hempel was not born in 1851. The last name of the novelist who edits The Believer is Julavits rather than Julawitz. Balzac’s first name is Honoré, not Henri.

III.
Paul Krugman:

In my column last Monday, I made a joke about the Swiss that fell flat with some readers. Also, the Swiss don’t wear lederhosen.

IV.
More Jing Wei—yaks!

V.
Sweeney on The Sin of Harold Diddlebock.

Disambiguations for Summer 2009

I. At last: A new New-York Ghost! Yes...it is the summer issue...Jen Snow told me she read it on her iPhone. Features a lengthy narrative and some jaw-droppingly great Jing Wei art.

II. From Jenny D—a nice bit of nomen-omening (NYT):

Air-conditioner sales at J. Eis & Sons on the Lower East Side are down almost 50 percent.

“It’s just not that hot,” said Lenny Eis (pronounced ice), the owner.

III. I'm at a library and I just peered around a desk at the room beyond a set of French doors—except it was a mirror, and the dude in the gray shirt was me. It's like an H.P. Lovecraft story!

IV. Disambiguation (did you notice I changed the name of this blog??) is taking a break till late August! "Keep cool."

xoxo,
Gossip Ed

Vacation settings

(More amazing Jing-work here.)