I recently ran across this video of Chip Kidd and James Ellroy. Though the video centers mostly on James Ellroy’s style and writing (he is one intense dude, no doubt) there are some spots where they discuss how the writing influences Kidd’s approach to designing a cover for the same author over and over. (Sidenote: Chip Kidd is also on Twitter as @chipkidd)
Book Review: X Saves the World
X Saves the World: How Generation X Got the Shaft but Can Still Keep Everything from Sucking by Jeff Gordinier
This is a book that I want to share with my friends. Gordinier does a FANTASTIC job of capturing the thoughts, discussions, issues and music that I had all throughout my school days.
Gordinier does a good job of outlining the media’s fascination with the tsunami that is the Baby Boomer generation and the lurid news fix on the youngest generation, the Millennials. Sandwiched between these two spotlight hogging masses is Generation X.
If you’re looking for a strong call to action to save the world and a 10 bullet-point plan for starting a movement. This book isn’t it (and you’re probably a Boomer anyway). If you’re looking for a book to outline a strategy to get your cause noticed and bring some media attention your way. This book isn’t it (and you’re probably a Millennial).
This book has all those things, but presents them in a much more REAL way. Not slacker. Not dumb. Not unmotivated. But data driven; experience driven; community driven. Real.
At 179 pages, it reads like a well-informed passionate op-ed piece and not much more. And the beauty of it, is that it doesn’t try to be much more. Sure there are the rants and causes that come into play late in the book, but this is all just to show what’s possible and what Generation X is grappling with now, in 2009.
At a minimum, the book will have you out renting Slacker, Googling Captain Beefheart and surfing eBay for Oblique Strategy Cards.
So if you’re looking for something to help you build you case or start a movement, there are probably better books out there. But if you’re interested in what’s happened over the past 20 years, where it’s all going and who is in charge, then this short cultural history is just the thing.
(Special thanks to Laura whose review made me want to pick up this book)
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Haunted Linn-Henley
Once you have recovered from the opening title slide (they used Papyrus), you can enjoy some of the legends surrounding the haunted stacks in Birmingham’s own Lynn-Henley library. Bwahahahaaaaaaaaa!
Kudos to the library crew that put this together. You guys should do regular videos featuring historical stories throughout the year.
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2009 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winners
For 27 years, the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest has been urging readers to send along the best of the worst opening lines for fictitious novels. They are always bad… which is good. And the best are really punny, even funny.
David McKenzie won this year’s contest. You can click through to read his entry. But I actually preferred the runner-up, so I include it below, plus a few others. If you do click through to their site, you can read all of the winners and runners-up in all the various categories.
This year’s Runner-Up was by Warren Blair:
The wind dry-shaved the cracked earth like a dull razor–the double edge kind from the plastic bag that you shouldn’t use more than twice, but you do; but Trevor Earp had to face it as he started the second morning of his hopeless search for Drover, the Irish Wolfhound he had found as a pup near death from a fight with a prairie dog and nursed back to health, stolen by a traveling circus so that the monkey would have something to ride.
Greg Homer’s “Vile Pun” category winner:
Using her flint knife to gut the two amphibians, Kreega the Neanderthal woman created the first pair of open-toad sandals.
Eric Rice won the “Detective” category with:
She walked into my office on legs as long as one of those long-legged birds that you see in Florida – the pink ones, not the white ones – except that she was standing on both of them, not just one of them, like those birds, the pink ones, and she wasn’t wearing pink, but I knew right away that she was trouble, which those birds usually aren’t.
One of my favorite “Dishonorable Mentions” this year was penned by Dan Blaufuss:
As Lieutenant Baker shrank his lips back to their normal size, he tried desperately to think of a situation in which his new-found power might be useful, as have I, your narrator.
