Have a very Merry Christmas, everyone. I’ll pop back in after the holidays sometime to post again, but for now, I leave you with the reading below.
I’ve been hearing a lot about Will Self’s infamous walks over the past few months, and now NY Times finally has a review of his book, Psychogeography.
What is “psychogeography”? The jacket flap defines it as a “meditation on the vexed relationship between psyche and place,” and any number of well-spectacled young Ph.D.’s in sociology or urban studies will talk to you of Situationists and leave you with the bar tab. At its writerly best, though, psychogeography seems simpler to me: it is clear and vivid nonfiction writing with a sense of the past and an eye for the present that takes us close to the street. I mean “street” both literally, as in the color of the paving stones and the font of the signage and the shape of the sidewalk, and figuratively, as in the multitudes that pass by, the movers and shakers, the loiterers and bystanders, the beggars and mimes. (A bartender might mix one part local historian, one part flâneur, one part novelist, one part raconteur. Call the resulting cocktail a Peter Ackroyd or a John Berger, a Rebecca Solnit or an Iain Sinclair.)
The Guardian has publishers comment on books that flopped and books they wished they’d published.
The linguistic functions of our minds.
With this many new magazines debuting in 2007, what kind of a decline in literacy are we seeing?
The wayward ethics of publishing houses charging exorbitant rates for copyrighted material (read through to the end – this type of story gets me angry).
