a little bit from everywhere : Philip Roth predicts novel will be minority cult….

[…] Roth has long been pessimistic about the survival of the novel in a gaudy, short-attention-span culture, but his latest prophesy is one of his bleakest yet, predicting that the form will dwindle to a “cultic” minority enthusiasm within 25 years.

The author believes that the concentration and focus required to read a novel is becoming less and less prevalent, as potential readers turn instead to computers or to television. “I was being optimistic about 25 years really. I think it’s going to be cultic. I think always people will be reading them but it will be a small group of people. Maybe more people than now read Latin poetry, but somewhere in that range,” Roth told Tina Brown, editor-in-chief of The Daily Beast. […]

how to get a letter to mean more than it reads

via Amandine Alessandra: Graphic Design.

artistav4.jpg (JPEG Image, 700×467 pixels).

* I’m trying to identify who did this tee shirt – if anyone can help, please contact R-Echos trough the comments below. Thanks!

Bach arranging and arranged < Hyphen Press

xkcd – A Webcomic – Terminology

The English is clear enough to lorry drivers – but the Welsh reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.”
When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road sign, they thought the reply was what they needed.

Via Hyphen Press Blog: ‘Making public signs may be more difficult than most other spheres of design.’

this is the Hand Drawn Map Association

humans from alien perspective

Other countries have different defining genres. For Spain, it is swashbuckling action romps (from Don Quixote to Arturo Pérez Reverte’s Captain Alatriste). For Italy, it is intellectual games-playing disguised as fiction (Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco), for France it is essays in deep cultural pessimism laced with a huge amount of bonking (The Sexual Life of Catherine M, anything by Michel Houellebecq).

The more one goes on, the more marked the tendency appears. Egyptians like busy, criss-crossed, urban narratives (Naguib Mahfouz, Alaa Al Aswany), Hungarians like aristocratic nostalgia (Sandor Marai, Miklos Banffy) and Latin Americans, of course, enjoy novels about dictators in which fantasy provides an escape from oppression (all of them up to and including Junot Díaz).

The mystery of the Swedish bookshop | Michael Gove – Times Online

(via Fade Theory)

Fanette Mellier (updates)

Fanette Mellier

”

(via manystuff.org.)