JOLLY DAYS, an artist's journal

A new book on the iBookstore:

Old Peculiar Tales

This is a book of eleven speculative tales of fantasy. Image rich, created as a “picturebook”.

I used a new App called Book Creator for the iPad to construct this book. There have been no dedicated tools for creating fixed position books, and, out of the blue, a wonderful developer in England, Dan Amos, has done what billion dollar corporations could not. Picturebooks are books that look like formatted books; like a PDF, rather than flowing web pages. An excellent format for image heavy eBooks, but mind-numbing to create from scratch by code.

Dan uses a very simple, transparent interface — he had set out to make this App useful for kids — but it turns out to be fully capable for professional production as well. In the latter case a bit of knowledge about CSS would help for tweaks, but in most cases, you can get along with just the tools offered by Book Creator.

Book Creator is fun. You open the app and you immediately figure it out.

You create the book in the app. Instead of following a meandering path to get the eBook into iBooks, you simply tap a menu choice and BC constructs the ePub and places it in iBooks. You can edit without the usual hassle of creating on the desktop, transferring to iTunes and syncing — a tremendous time saver. Dan is currently working to enable audiobook capability and later videos.

I once taught in an after school center with the charge of introducing printmaking. You should have seen the pure delight expressed by children when they see a print of their drawing appear. It made you smile. Some kids would laugh out loud or even shriek. I can imagine whole classes filled with delighted children at seeing their creations appear in iBooks using Book Creator.

At first it was a surprise to see the solution BC offers; one expects a desktop application to create these picturebooks. It makes so much more sense to have the app on your iPad.

At the App store: Book Creator

Dan’s site, redjumper.net

iPad Sketchbook 4

This is the fourth in a series of digital sketchbooks containing expressive images created on the iPad. This is an enhanced eBook, with thirty images, and includes sped-up movies which depict the creation of two of the images.

After a battle with WordPress and obstinate plugins — which resulted in Jolly Days loading as a blank page; and a battle with a cell phone company about its online payment implementation, and not being able to run today —  I’m feeling pecked to death by ducks. Until you realize the context — the greater tribulations of the world — the Arab world in turmoil with uncertain outcome; the devastation in Japan; our president who seems one step behind too often and the Republicans in disarray, the ominous future for the economy if something is not done — it doesn’t make you feel perky.

I’ve been working hard to publish more books at the iBookstore; not satisfying creative work, but rather meticulous, mind numbing work. I’m very proud of the result though:

iPad Sketchbook 3
Ira Altschiller: Works on Paper
Ira Altschiller: A Retrospective

and two more to come: picturebooks is what Apple calls them, which are fixed layout books for a better presentation of books which have an emphasis on images.

I did want to mention a funny link provided at Jason Kottke’s site

Someone at Yahoo Answers uploaded a page of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest as his own and asked for comments.

Rated as the best answer / criticism:

You know your story needs more work, so you don’t need anyone to tell you what you already know.

Comment sections are always pretty funny. Some people don’t like the snarkiness, and I’m not a big fan of that aspect, but often there are interesting ideas and commentary as well. It is the mosh pit after all. A financial journalist at bloggingheads said that she always felt that people weren’t asking questions or engaging ideas  in comments sections of weblogs, they were trying to appear smart.

The idea of sending great literature as if written by sender to an established publisher has been done over the years. Rejection letters for masterpieces like War and Peace leaves one agape — like the audience watching The Frankie singing Puttin’ on the Ritz in Mel Brooks’ Young Frankenstein. Saul Bellow stopped sending his stories to the New Yorker after a full of himself young editor told him how he should correct his piece. Bellow had recently won the Nobel Prize.

Joyce’s novella The Dead was made into a movie in 1987 by John Huston, then in his 80s. This was a project of love, with his daughter Anjelica in the lead role. We just saw it in a Netflix rental. The movie begins with a depiction of the long associations of human society and quirks of personality as manifested at a party. You feel the weight of time on these people living in Ireland in 1904. Their characters are all delimited and defined in a way that is a marvel. Like My Dinner With Andre, Huston has taken a minimalist setting and made it something so much more complex. Anjelica Huston is a great actress. Her silent presence in so many scenes gave the movie a tremendous emotional richness.

Underlying it all is the genius of Joyce. His language en-flowers as the story evolves into a meditation on living and dying. At first this human society is mundane, slightly boring, quietly funny. Then on the carriage ride home The Dead opens up into a dark space that makes you shudder, like traveling into a boundless forest. You feel the emotional separation of husband and wife.

When Anjelica Huston tells her husband — a “sensible man” she sneers — of the long lost love of her youth; of her guilt at this young boy’s death, she overflows with grief and finally loses herself hugging, clutching at her husband. But she immediately pushes her husband away — she will not accept even his consolation. Her husband muses over the evening party and falls into a reverie about his life, his beloved wife, and the lives of his friends and family, and then into a reverie about all our lives. It is like a melting into something larger and larger, as Frost defined poetry.

Clearly no one could re-write Joyce in the concluding scene. It has to be repeated and heard in Joyce’s words and so the filmmaker resorts to the slightly awkward technique of voice-over to give full throat to Joyce. Joyce mingles prose and poetry in a great yielding resonance of language and feeling.

A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window. It had begun to snow again. He watched sleepily the flakes, silver and dark, falling obliquely against the lamplight. The time had come for him to set out on his journey westward. Yes, the newspapers were right: snow was general all over Ireland. It was falling on every part of the dark central plain, on the treeless hills, falling softly upon the Bog of Allen and, farther westward, softly falling into the dark mutinous Shannon waves. It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried. It lay thickly drifted on the crooked crosses and headstones, on the spears of the little gate, on the barren thorns. His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the descent of their last end, upon all the living and the dead.

Lie to Me is a show that was a good idea but never worked. Tim Roth has a bad case of Jon Lovitz’ SNL Great Thespian. The entire show is about Tim and his acting turns. The Other Great Thespian James Woods had the same problem in his last TV outing. Too much James. In every scene, always right in any disagreement, always the center of attention. Remember Seinfeld? Everyone on the show had their star turns. Seinfeld understood and was generous to his colleagues. Michael Caine said that when another actor does a great job in a movie he is overjoyed. It makes his job easier. Caine understands.

House as well has tanked after hardly surfacing. It was a show that worked for awhile but turned into another show with cute relationship David Kelley banter. What happened to the creator’s idea that House would be a mystery where the criminal was the disease? The writers don’t trust the premise of their own show and go for mawkish and ingratiating. BTW, What is it with TV lead male actors and their unshaven slovenly presence onscreen? Is that more real? The Great Thespian drools for the camera; no real plot, gibberish interactions with clever jokes. The only game in town and they know it.

With so much to think about in this time of recession and international turmoil, the press continues its own celebrity turn — the intolerable commentators serving their affinity herd or the corporation. Evan White on Inside Washington has become nearly the only commentator who appears to be parsing events rather than looking over his shoulder.

Netflix, which was supposed to be a refuge from all of the above has been for awhile the world’s greatest bin of B movies. Movies you would never watch but for what else is on. Once in awhile you hit something but it is rare indeed. One thing you learn is how hard it must be to make a movie, or perhaps how little anyone cares if it is good or not. Make it and they will come, seems to be motto. The only game in town.

We’ve been listening to audiobooks downloaded from the library using the Overdrive console. They are heavy on WMA format, leaving Mac users in the lurch, but have enough to divert. We have been listening to Dance Dance Dance, Haruki Murakami’s excellent mystery, given a good performance reading. It is a little harder going with Roberto Bolaño’s 2666, a Chilean high-mystery conundrum of a book. You don’t feel you are wasting your time at least.

The 1960s pop culture commentator and éminence grise Marshall McLuhan has been treated to a biography of sorts.

The NYT reviewer David Carr says,

“Marshall McLuhan: You Know Nothing of My Work!” is an odd title for a weird book.

Carr goes on to say it isn’t “weird bad”; but “odd title” misses the Annie Hall/Woody Allen reference. You had to see the movie.

Carr is excellent in considering the confusing mish mash of ideas and estimate circling McLuhan. McLuhan is in a long line of media gurus who fancy up the junk culture with serious thought. Serious thought as it manifests itself in academic guild talk. Brittle slathered on gooey.

McLuhan was clever. Not as clever as the real mothership of floating culture, Walter Benjamin (in his sociological discourse), but McLuhan had his moments.

Seems if you want to be famous in contemporary culture you need a slogan, as it used to be called, or now, a meme. McLuhan’s was “the medium is the message” which isn’t bad in beating insensate the pop culture’s lack of content except it isn’t as good as “the style is the man”. Oh, no, I don’t mean that at all McLuhan would say, you know nothing of my work. Well, McLuhan probably meant less than that old observation about the way we express our true natures.

The medium is the message is new though, or was in the 1960s. But that makes it old.

Among many interesting interchanges, Denis Dutton’s 1976 interview with the great writer Jorge Luis Borges,

DD: How do you distinguish the literary from the philosophical means in that story (Borges’ “Orbis Tertius”)? Could you explain that?

Borges: Oh, well, yes, I’ll explain very easily…. Encyclopedias have been, I’d say, my life’s chief reading. I have always been interested in encyclopedias. Well, I used to go to the Biblioteca Nacional in Buenos Aires — and since I was so shy, I felt I could not cope with asking for a book, or a librarian, so I looked on the shelves for the Encyclopædia Britannica. Of course, afterwards, I had that book at home, by my hand. And then I would pick up any chance volume and I would read it. And then one night I was richly rewarded, because I read all about the Druses, Dryden, and the Druids — a treasure trove, no? — all in the same volume, of course, “Dr–.”

Then I came to the idea of how fine it would be to think of an encyclopedia of an actual world, and then of an encyclopedia, a very rigorous one of course, of an imaginary world, where everything should be linked. Where, for example, you would have, let’s say, a language and then a literature that went with the language, and then a history with it, and so on. Then I thought, well, I’d write a story of the fancy encyclopedia. Then of course that would need many different people to write it, to get together and to discuss many things — the mathematicians, philosophers, men of letters, architects, engineers, then also novelists or historians. Then, as I needed a quite different world from ours — it wasn’t enough to invent fancy names — I said, why not a world based on, let’s say, Berkeleyan ideas?

“Encyclopedias have been, I’d say, my life’s chief reading.” Borges was living on the internet long before the world caught up. The prescience of art.

Like many who came to Arts and Letters Daily I only knew Denis Dutton through his site. Arts and Letters Daily was an oasis. ALDaily spoke of intelligence and wit and seriousness. A paradigm for what the internet could be. It was a happy day when he honored me with a link to this weblog.

Styled on an old style Broadsheet posted in the town square the site’s restraint has resonance.

Some of the many links to Denis’ passing as mentioned at his site.
The New Yorker
Reason
Edge

Dutton’s spirit will live on at his site which his colleagues promise to carry on.

Denis’ site motto: veritas odit moras=Truth hates delay

A new eBook at the iBookstore: iPad Sketchbook 2

This new sketchbook has over 100 images and animations depicting the evolution of several drawings. A permanent link is in the iBookstore links area on the navigation column to the right.

Here are some updated iBookstore links:

iPad Sketchbook

Legends of Ghost Island, Book One

Drawing on Walls

Creative Quotations, Stillness in the Midst of Chaos

25 Secrets of the Muse: A Book of Creative Strategies

A Curmudgeon’s Bestiary

Ancient World

These links will have a permanent home in the sidebar.

We are planning to see a movie whose plot is…

…disoriented after a 1993 failed attempt on Pakistan’s K2, the second-highest mountain in the world, [an author] took a wrong turn into the village of Korphe, was nursed back to health by the villagers and, in gratitude, vowed to build them a school.

Still more treacly, the author did indeed build schools for girls, who were particularly deprived of educational opportunities.

But we are not done with the unlikely tale. The author then, with a journalist, wrote a book about his experience. The book became a hit among the wives of commanders in Iraq who passed it back and forth and finally to their husbands.

But, treacly or not, it is true. Yada, yada, yada, it is now — establishing good relations with the people of Afghanistan — a focus of our efforts in that county.

…will take tremendous comfort in knowing people like you are helping Afghans build a future

wrote General McChrystal in the last moments of his command — having been recently fired by president Obama — to the author, Greg Mortenson.

Soon to be a major motion picture.