hello hello books

Want to go to there. Mostly because March anywhere that’s not Maine is pretty welcome right now.

traincommaelevated:

Los Angeles, CA - Silver Lake - March 2012

2 months ago -

1

a nice bookstore story you’ll like.

Sometimes I like to tell you about things that have happened, and this is one of those times.

I was just looking around in the new collection My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate Their Favorite Places to Browse, Read and Shop for something to post here. There are plenty o’writers talking about plenty o’bookshops in the book, and if they ever publish a sequel, I of course hope we end up in it, but for now I would have been super happy to post something about another shop. BUT! Just as I was reading, customer Sarah R. walked by after having made her purchases and told me she had a new tagline for the store inspired by her visit:

“A good bookstore makes you think of everybody you know.”

Emily M. was there, too, and she tweaked it to:

“A great bookstore makes you think of everybody you love.”

They agreed that this applied to hello hello. My heart grew three sizes this day.

4 months ago -

2

Here’s why I will never see the Cloud Atlas movie.

Kathryn Schulz nails one of the things that bothered me most about the very idea of the book transitioning to the screen:

“One of the many things I loved about Cloud Atlas, the book — a retronym I resent having to type, by the way — is the way it shows language itself changing over time. You get immersed in these successive argots, from a mid-nineteenth-century English that feels archaic to an invented 22nd-century idiom that is dystopically new (half the nouns and verbs come from products: cameras are kodaks, etc.) to an even more distant future where the language, like the culture, has lapsed back into something rough and primitive again. It’s slightly difficult to manage that newest and most invented language even in the book, but by the time you get there, 300 pages in, Mitchell has entirely earned your trust. The movie, by contrast, opens with Tom Hanks babbling in this made-up lingo, and the combination — the lingo, and Tom Hanks — almost made me walk out of the movie before it had barely started.”

6 months ago

workman:

alecshao:

Famous Notebooks

1. Mark Twain - “He had his leather bound notebooks custom made according to his own design idea. Each page had a tab; once a page had been used, he would tear off its tab, allowing him to easily find the next blank page for his jottings”

2 & 3. Charles Darwin - “The notebooks were filled with memorandum to himself on things to look further into, questions he wanted to answer, scientific speculations, notes on the many books he was currently reading, natural observations, sketches, and lists of the books he had read and wanted to read. But the progression is far from orderly: the entries are chaotically arranged and wide-ranging; they jump from one scientific subject to the next and are interspersed with notes on correspondences and conversations. He would rest the notebook on his desk and write horizontally down the page with a pen, and, like Isaac Newton, he would sometimes start in from both ends of the notebook at once and work towards the middle.

4. Jack Kerouac - The notebook entry reads:

“Ginsberg — intelligent enuf, interested in the outward appearance & pose of great things, intelligent enuf to know where to find them, but once there he acts like Jerry Newman, the photographer anxious to be photographed photographing —— Ginsberg wants to run his hand up the backs of people, for this he gives and seldom takes — He is also a mental screwball

*(Tape recorder anxious to be tape recorded tape recording) (like Seymour Barab anxious to have his name in larger letters than Robert Louis Stevenson, like Steinberg & Verlaine Rimbaud Baudelaire”

5. Ernest Hemingway - The notebook entry reads:

“My name is Ernest Miller Hemingway

I was born on July 21, 1899

My favorite authors are Kipling, O. Henry and Steuart Edward White.

My favorite flower is lady slipper and tiger lily.

My favorite sports are trout fishing, hiking, shooting, football and boxing.

My favorite studies are English, zoology and chemistry.

I intend to travel and write.”

(Source: likeafieldmouse, via unabridgedbookstore)

8 months ago -

8889

booksmatter:

After a Rain
by Mary Ruefle

They noticed, you see, that I was a noticing
kind of person, and so they left the dictionary
out in the rain and I noticed it,
I noticed it was open to the rain page,
much harm had come to it, it had aged to the age
of ninety-five paper years and I noticed rainbow
follows rain in the book, just as it does on
earth, and I noticed it was silly of me to
notice so much but I noticed there is no stationary
in heaven, I noticed an infant will grip your hand like
there is no tomorrow, while the very aged
will give you a weightless hand for the same reason,
I noticed in a loving frenzy that some are hemlocked
and others are not (believe me yours unspeakably obliged),
I noticed whoever I met in my search for entrance
into this world went too far (but that was their
destination) and I noticed the road followed roughly
the route of a zipper around a closed case,
I noticed the sea was human but no one believed me,
and that some birds have the wingspan of an inch
and some flowers the petal span of a foot yet the two
are very well suited to each other, I noticed that.
There are eight major emotional states but I forget
seven of them, I can hear the ambulance singing
but I don’t think it will stop for me,
because I noticed the space between the waterfall and
the rock and I am safe there, resting in
the cradle of all there is, the way a sea horse
(when it is tired) will tie its tail to a seaweed
and rest, and there has not been, in my opinion,
enough astonishment over this fact, so now I will
withdraw my interest in the whole external world
while I am in the noticing mode, notice how I
talk to you just as if you were sitting on my lap
and not as if it were raining, not as if there were
a sheet of water between us or anything else.

(from Indeed I Was Pleased With the World)