The Hulk is on Twitter, in many forms. But did you know he is a feminist?
Not to mention a Buddhist?HULK FIND COMPLICITY BETWEEN ALL SYSTEMS OF OPPRESSION. RESULT: HULK HAVE VERY DIVERSE PORTFOLIO OF SMASH.
You might think that a commitment to smash would be the antithesis of Buddhism, but in fact it is the ultimate expression of detachment from the material world. Think on't.HULK GRATEFUL FOR IMPERMANENCE. OTHERWISE IT SAME SMASH EVERY DAY.
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The only thing that tempers my enthusiasm for Benjamin Andrews's Bookah is the knowledge that it only confirms D's worst suspicions about the nature of my book addiction.
If there is a tangible gain from the physicality of a book, then Bookah surely benefits the reader to an unprecedented extent. By concentrating the scent of 31 old books into a confined space, the much-praised aspect of the physical book is exaggerated to embody consumer technology's tendency to fetishize simple pleasures. The fact that you can't already buy the Bookah is really quite surprising. Here knowledge is contained within the sterile white walls of a modern product and powerfully ingested by the user, albeit in a hopelessly ineffective way.
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Got Medieval has been exploring how medieval bookmakers combated piracy. With a good book curse.
Here's how they went:For a book curse is essentially the same as that little FBI warning that pops up whenever you try to watch a movie: a toothless text charm included by the media's maker meant to frighten the foolish. The charm only works if you believe that words are special, potent magic.
See what they did there? Steal a book, have your name removed from the book.Should anyone by craft of any device whatever abstract this book from this place may his soul suffer, in retribution for what he has done, and may his name be erased from the book of the living and not recorded among the Blessed.
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My friend Lara (whom I have known since we were four and shared a kindergarten class, as well as birthdays a mere two days apart) is a brilliant photographer, most often of luminous botanical subjects. She has just opened an Etsy shop: go check it out. My favorite of her pieces is "Lotus Petal Curve."
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I've been telling everyone I can grab ahold of and mutter to about the Yojimbo influence on Avatar: The Last Airbender. So it seems that the least I can do is link to this recent AV Club overview of the work of the great Akira Kurosawa.
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My bibliophile nature may cause a terrible outbreak of hives every time I hear about unwanted remnants of library sales being left in a dumpster, but in general I am not a fetishizer of the intact book. I write in my books (although almost always in pencil, ever since I came to rue the plentiful inked exclamations from my college years - "Irony!" was the most common), and I like a book that shows the wear of my ownership at least as well as one that is pristine. I often buy books used, and although I usually try to buy them as unmarked as possible, I have been known to delight in reading the marginalia of my predecessors, as I did with Jim the Boy. I recently bought a collection of academic essays at a very reasonable price, only to discover that it had been previously owned by a prominent scholar in my field (the binding falls open naturally to her essay in the volume, but that isn't the only way I identified the book as hers). She has written hilarious (and intimidating) little judgments on all of the other essays ("Provocative, until the cutesie ending," reads one), and goes so far (post-publication, I have to add) as to copy-edit the phrasing of some of her colleagues' prose.
At any rate, the point is that I love the book as material object almost as much as I love it as a container of knowledge and narrative, and (rare books aside) I am intrigued by the ways we as readers and users add to and alter the value of the volume as art object or cultural artifact. So I always enjoy pieces like this one at the New York Times about unusual uses for books.
