Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Tuesday, August 21

1. "It’s not too much of a stretch to say that I live in Portland because Powell’s Books is here." (James Tata at Maud Newton)

2. Libraries at the beach. (Via Dizzyhead Thomas)

3. Meaty profile on Jonathan Coe, who has a new novel coming out: In terms of wider literary inspirations...The Rain Before It Falls owes a considerable amount to two rather surprising writers. One is BS Johnson, a modernist novelist of the 1960s and 1970s, who was the subject of Coe’s biography Like a Fiery Elephant, and whose tortured credo that “telling stories is telling lies” haunted Coe during the writing of the new book (he admits, in fact, that his novels have been getting darker ever since the Johnson biography). The other, happier influence is Rosamond Lehmann, whom Coe first read in his mid-twenties, and whom he considers one of the 20th century’s key writers. —Times Online
(Via Dizzyhead Gautam)

4. Jenny D on writing:

I draft the whole thing (we’re talking about novels here) from start to finish, writing in longhand in little notebooks. Then I type up the draft, including a first edit. Then I edit the hard copy, type in revisions, repeat ad nauseam. This latest novel probably underwent at least 10 revision cycles, each one of which potentially involved two or three or four close copy-edits. At some point (usually more than once), I read the whole thing out loud to myself, to make sure the sentences sound right and that I can stand by them.

Stet! — On genius — Our favorite symbol

1. A genius of literature!

2. In "Black Magic" (review of Esther Leslie's Synthetic World, TLS, 8/3/07):

At about the same time a young German chemist, August Kekulé von Stradonits, had an epiphanic moment on a London bus that led him to intuit the combinatorial power of carbon. This discovery, abetted by another "vision," would assist in just a few short years the German production, first, of synthetic colours, then of therapeutic drugs, and later of war materials...

What was the vision? From Wikipedia:

He said that he had discovered the ring shape of the benzene molecule after having a reverie or day-dream of a snake seizing its own tail (this is a common symbol in many ancient cultures known as the Ouroboros). This vision, he said, came to him after years of studying the nature of carbon-carbon bonds.

3. Random cryptic Portland picture:

Dizzies Newsfeeds™ for Thursday, August 16

1. Via Weekend Stubble, a fun project by Keith Phipps over at the Onion's AV Club, in which he reads through a box of old paperbacks.

2. New Ghost later today...

3. Via Slate/Magnum, an eye-opening portfolio of photos of Korea in commemoration of 8/15/1945, marking the end of Japan's colonization of the peninsula.

4. Dizzyhead Benno on Resurrecting the Champ at L Magazine. I like the perverse praising of Hartnett's "averageness of intelligence and talent."

5. Levi has the lowdown on two of the three amazing Lawrence Block books (Grifter's Game and The Girl With the Long Green Heart) brought out by Hard Case Crime. Side note: I've Been Reading is one of the best written literary blogs out there, and I don't say this just because his tastes match mine (Block, Borges, Powell) in a lot of cases.

6. In Portland, I went to Powell's (and went to Powell's...and went to Powell's). Among the books bought: This one!

8. Dizzyhead Jen sends this ouroboros by Ryan McGinness:



9. And I will mysteriously add my own (c. 1996):