Tag Archives: books

Flipping (Virtually) Through a Book of Cubo-Futurist Poetry

From Hyperallergic:

Life is shorter than the squeal of a sparrow.
Like a dog, regardless, sailing
on an ice floe down the river in spring?

Vasily Kamensky, with illustrations by David and Vladimir Burliuk, ‘Tango s korovami : zhelezobetonnyi︠a︡ poėmy’ (Tango with Cows, 1914), showing “Telephone” (all images courtesy the Getty Research Institute)

So opens the title poem of Tango with Cows, a 1914 book by Vasily Kamensky, with accompanying drawings by David and Vladimir Burliuk. All three artists were members of the group Hylaea, whose 1912 manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” is often cited as formally starting the Russian Futurist movement. Unlike the Italian Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s “Manifesto of Futurism,” which proposed not only a new relationship to art but to all of life as well, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste” was more specifically concerned with upending the literary status quo. [read more]

…The book, in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Getty — which has made its version available digitally

 

A page is a door [inspiration]

A Page is a Door

by Remy Charlip

The Excitement in a well written book happens from word to word, sentence to sentence, paragraph to paragraph, chapter to chapter.

But usually the turning from page to page is incidental, and in a long book a bother. It doesn’t matter if something happens on page 9 or 289.

While reading a book, I sometimes wish I didn’t have to hold it up, it gets so heavy, and I fantasize a sea of type automatically unrolling, one word in focus at a time, at just the right speed, on a moving screen or scroll.

A scroll, or long paper with accordion pleats or separate sheets in a portfolio are all books of a sort. But a book, as we refer to it today, has distinct physical properties, just as painting, sculpture, film, and other art forms have their distinct physical properties

A book is a series of pages held together at one edge, and these pages can be moved on their hinges like a swinging door. They could also be half-doors, doors with windows, double doors, like fold-outs, doors with attachments, pop-ups, textures or moving parts, and shaped doors.

Of course if a door has something completely different behind it, it is much more exciting. The element of delight and surprise is helped by the physical power we feel in our own hands when we move that page or door to reveal a change in everything that has gone before, in time, place, or character.

A thrilling picture book not only makes beautiful single images or sequential images, but also allows us to become aware of a book’s unique physical structure, by bringing our attention, once again, to that momentous moment: the turning of the page.

via The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick.

NEWSgrist – where spin is art: The People’s Library

What follows is an excerpt from a recent post by Mira Schor about The People’s Library at Zuccotti Park, and a piece from Inside Higher Ed on the librarians who make it all possible, with a video clip by author Matthew Battles on the history of libraries and protest. Links to the history and catalog of The People’s library provided at the end.

via NEWSgrist – where spin is art: The People’s Library.

Link to People’s Library Blog