I'm a publicist at Cambridge University Press; a theater critic for Back Stage magazine; a freelance writer; and an aggressive seasoner of food.
Contact: nevilleneuve at gmail dot com
Catching Elephant is a theme by Andy Taylor
This is “The ABC of Anger”. It was in the section for older pre-readers, ie 5-7. That’s a koala bear, nattily dressed, caressing a little girl. His face is, I feel, chillingly disassociated from the penitent child. Justice will be served. Think about this cool koala sociopath next time you are tempted to be rude to a French waiter
Terrifying French children’s books, via The Guardian
I’ve started writing about the favorite dishes of famous authors at Paper and Salt. If Norman Mailer’s experimental salad recipe featuring Haagen Dazs raspberry sorbet vinaigrette gets you going, you might want to take a look.
To celebrate the bicentennial of Dickens’ birth, Cambridge is publishing a full-color reproduction of the Great Expectations original manuscript. I talk about it a little bit over at The Paris Review Daily. People are always mourning the death of the handwritten letter, but rarely do they long for the days of writing manuscripts out freehand. I’m on the fence, I have to say. On one hand, it is pretty exciting to see all of Dickens’ hesitations, corrections, annotations. On the other, he is very lucky he was his own editor and publisher - I doubt he’d find another who could translate the scrawl.
Apropos of nothing: Hemingway kicking a can.
via ethaney via #lit
With all the excitement surrounding the publication of The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, I’m surprised I hadn’t seen this photo yet. I do, of course, enjoy the old Ballantine Ale ads; Hemingway was a notorious shill, lending his name to Pam Am and Parker 51 pens, among others. The Ballantine photo’s combination of worldliness with resignedness reminds me of Bill Murray’s “Suntory time” ads in Lost in Translation. There’s a melancholia to them that doesn’t seem to haunt most celebrity endorsements today.
And while we’re all shilling, check out this mouthwatering Hemingway dinner party menu.
"This is another source of the genre’s appeal: in a culture defined by knowingness and ironic distance, genuine surprise is increasingly rare — a spiritual luxury that brings us close to something ancient."
- Sam Anderson, on reaction videos, in The New York Times Magazine
Nowhere on this list is there any indication that it is 2011.
Every four months or so, the topic of deckled edges inevitably resurfaces. Someone has recently purchased a Knopf hardcover, or else he has found an old edition of Ada or Ardor at the Strand. He’ll thumb cautiously through the pages. “Why do they do that?” he’ll ask me. “Is it just to look old?”
In anticipation of the next few instances of this conversation, I’d like to point you toward this old-but-still-helpful essay in The Millions on deckle-edge or rough-cut pages. The jagged edges stem from the days when books were printed on long rectangular sheets that were folded over, and then the “unopened” pages were sliced through by hand, often by the printer but sometimes by a pioneering first reader. The pages in Gatsby’s library were famously unopened (as opposed to “uncut,” which refer to pages whose rough edges have not yet been trimmed). It’s one of my favorite literary moments of un-reading, second to Jane Eyre’s observation of Blanche Ingram, who, jilted by Rochester, “took a book, leant back in her chair, and so declined further conversation. I watched her for nearly half-an-hour: during all that time she never turned a page.”
Why keep the deckled edge when it’s no longer the byproduct of a printing convention? In The Millions, an associate production manager at Knopf credits the “vintage” factor, with the rough-cut pages as “something that harkens back to an older way.” Ruth Franklin, in an article about last year’s BEA, suggests that the uneven pages discourage habitual page-flippers, and promotes a more languorous engagement with the text. A commenter notes the ability of the deckled edge to conceal any scuffing, for easy bookstore resale or to look nice and neat on your own personal bookshelf. But isn’t one of the benefits of the rough pages the idea that, with each rip, you’re creating a one-of-a-kind artifact, as personal to you as the patterns of wear unique to each reader?
Maybe it used to be that way. Now, though, we have the uncanny ability to make even uneven edges uniform.
"Even Vladimir Nabokov had an eye for self-marketing, subtly suggesting to photo editors that they feature him as a lepidopterist prancing about the forests in cap, shorts and long socks. ('Some fascinating photos might be also taken of me, a burly but agile man, stalking a rarity or sweeping it into my net from a flowerhead,' he enthused.)"
For every author that squirms at the thought of shameless self-promotion, whom I cajole into writing op-eds and guest blog entries: Know that you are entering a long and celebrated tradition.
