Check out this cool design project, where a designer hand-lettered the lyrics to Bob Dylan’s “Subterranean Homesick Blues”, similar to the infamous video clip/music video precursor featuring Dylan holding up cards with the lyrics on them, as written by himself, Allen Ginsberg and others.

Photo by Leandro Senna, courtesy of www.leandrosenna.com

The designer/artist Leandro Senna says of the project:

Inspired by Bob Dylan’s ‘Subterranean Homesick Blues’ video, where he flips cards with the lyrics as the song plays, I decided to recreate those cards with handmade type. I ended up doing all the lyrics, and not just some of the words, as Dylan did.

There are 66 cards done in one month during my spare time using only pencil, black tint pens and brushes. The challenge was not to use the computer, no retouching was allowed. Getting a letter wrong meant starting the page over. There are some intentional misspellings and puns on the original song video, so I tried to keep that in a certain way.

Here’s the link to see closeup photos of each individual card, and here’s the link to see the video of these cards flipped through with the song overlaid. Which cards are your favorites?

And of course, if you need a fix, here’s the original video clip with Dylan.

Jimmy Kimmel, bless his heart, has curated another hilariously awkward snapshot of disturbing human behavior. Following video stunts like asking parents to videotape their children’s reactions to being told their Halloween candy was eaten by Mom & Dad overnight (the kids go apeshit) and then asking parents to “prank” their kids with terrible Christmas gifts, he’s done it again. In the clip below, Kimmel’s show sent a crew to the Coachella music festival to ask attendees their opinions about obscure bands with ridiculous names. The catch? The bands don’t exist– they made ‘em up. So we get to watch ridiculously tanned college kids dressed as hippies wax poetic about how these made up bands are soooo awesome. They’re led to the cliff, of course, but man, do they jump right off. I like the dig at the prevailing know-it-all culture of music lovers, but I also think that this experiment could be staged in all sorts of ways, on all sorts of topics. Seems to me that if you stick a microphone and camera in someone’s face and talk to them as if they’re an expert, they’ll act like an expert, no matter what. And if you don’t believe me,  please enjoy watching these Coachella attendees lie their asses off about how much they love those made-up indie bands, speaking with complete confidence and enthusiasm… about bands they’ve never heard about because they don’t exist.

Here’s the link to the Hulu clip and NPR writeup.

If you’re looking for an incredible read, check out this New York Times Magazine profile of ultra-athlete Kilian Jornet Burgada, written by Christopher Solomon. It was brought to my attention last night by two writers I follow on Twitter, and I stopped paying attention to everyone/everything around me to read it, based on this first paragraph:

Kilian Jornet Burgada is the most dominating endurance athlete of his generation. In just eight years, Jornet has won more than 80 races, claimed some 16 titles and set at least a dozen speed records, many of them in distances that would require the rest of us to purchase an airplane ticket. He has run across entire landmasses­ (Corsica) and mountain ranges (the Pyrenees), nearly without pause. He regularly runs all day eating only wild berries and drinking only from streams. On summer mornings he will set off from his apartment door at the foot of Mont Blanc and run nearly two and a half vertical miles up to Europe’s roof — over cracked glaciers, past Gore-Tex’d climbers, into the thin air at 15,781 feet — and back home again in less than seven hours, a trip that mountaineers can spend days to complete. A few years ago Jornet ran the 165-mile Tahoe Rim Trail and stopped just twice to sleep on the ground for a total of about 90 minutes. In the middle of the night he took a wrong turn, which added perhaps six miles to his run. He still finished in 38 hours 32 minutes, beating the record of Tim Twietmeyer, a legend in the world of ultrarunning, by more than seven hours. When he reached the finish line, he looked as if he’d just won the local turkey trot.

It keeps getting better.

So what’s next when you’re 25 and every one of the races on the wish list you drew up as a youngster has been won and crossed out? You dream up a new challenge. Last year Jornet began what he calls the Summits of My Life project, a four-year effort to set speed records climbing and descending some of the world’s most well known peaks, from the Matterhorn this summer to Mount Everest in 2015. In doing so, he joins a cadre of alpinists like Ueli Steck from Switzerland and Chad Kellogg from the United States who are racing up peaks and redefining what’s possible. In a way, Jornet says, all of his racing has been preparation for greater trials. This month, he is in the Himalayas with a couple of veteran alpinists. They plan to climb and ski the south face of a peak that hasn’t been skied before in winter.

Seriously, go read the whole thing. Fascinating. Jornet’s memoir will be out in July, titled Run or Die.

Sallie Ford and The Sound Outside’s new album isn’t out until February 19, but you can listen to the whole thing via The A.V. Club here.

If you dug their previous album, Dirty Radio, as much as I did, you’ll want to head over there and give this a listen.

If you didn’t get a chance to check out their previous work, you can head over to their website and stream their first album in its entirety. To cleanse your palette if you watched more than 45 seconds of the Grammys, start with “I Swear,” the first track on Dirty Radio, in which lead singer rages beautifully: When I turn on the radio/it all sounds the same/what have these people done to music/they just don’t care anymore.

Here’s the video. Enjoy!

Sometimes there are too many literary events to go to, and you have to let some slide in the interest of staying sane. I have to admit: I wasn’t in the mood to attend the latest reading in Spokane, featuring Ben Fountain and Jess Walter, but I did, and it turned out to be one of those happy coincidences that makes you feel like you found a $20 bill in an old jacket pocket. Not only was it a good reading, but the discussion and Q&A were particularly relevant to a topic many of us deal with often: the relationship between research and writing.

Ben Fountain, a 2012 National Book Award finalist, was in Spokane to speak at Gonzaga University, reading from his widely acclaimed novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk. He shared the stage with Spokane native and award-winning author Jess Walter, who is following up the success of his novel Beautiful Ruins—a book that Kirkus Reviews called “brilliant”—with a collection of short stories, We Live in Water. The event itself was a mixture of reading and conversation; a format that echoed Walter’s reading last year with Colson Whitehead as part of the 2012 Get Lit! Festival. Walter read part of a short story from the new collection, warmed up the crowd with his sense of humor, offered some well-timed jokes, and graciously let the visiting writer Fountain take the stage.

Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk centers on 19-year-old American soldier Billy Lynn, deployed to Iraq but returned to the US with his squad for a two-week “Victory Tour,” organized by government PR experts to drum up support for the war. The anti-war novel has been widely praised, was a finalist for the National Book Award, and has been mentioned more than once in conversations about potential Pulitzer nominees. However, the most interesting part of the evening for me, having not read the novel yet, was the Q&A. Read more »

Since being posted on Thursday, January 24 on the Rainn Wilson-curated YouTube channel SoulPancake, this video has been making the rounds. I know I’m the lazy Barker who’s posting videos two weeks in a row, but this one is pretty great. You won’t want to miss it. Enjoy!

NOT COOL, ROBERT FROST!

I’ve been researching children’s book writers lately, and came across this book trailer last week. Lane Smith has illustrated such classics as The Stinky Cheese Man and The True Story of the Three Little Pigs, among many others that he’s both written and illustrated. Enjoy!

“Yet there are moments when the walls of the mind grow thin; when nothing is unabsorbed, and I could fancy that we might blow so vast a bubble that the sun might set and rise in it and we might take the blue of midday and the black of midnight and be cast off and escape from here and now.”
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves

Where would you escape to, if you could?  Read more »

I have a question for you, Bark readers. So let’s crowdsource it and see what we come up with. Why do we publish hardback original editions of books? As in, why do we publish novels or memoirs or even, occasionally, short story collections in hardback form? Why shouldn’t all new editions, which are currently released in hardback form, just come out in paperback form on their pub date? Related question: does this make me a socialist?

In the current model, some, but nowhere near all, new releases come out in hardback, and then are released later in paperback. The books released in hardback supposedly carry more prestige, and are able to generate more buzz and more reviews, which can lead to better sales, consideration for awards, and so on. However, many books are released in paperback, and the conventional wisdom is that it’s harder to generate national publicity for those books, because hardback first editions usually come from big publishers with a lot of marketing muscle, and thus it’s harder to get reviews for first edition paperbacks.

A hardback short story collection? It’s like seeing a unicorn!

The obvious answer is that hardbacks make more money, for both the publisher and author. My understanding is that the profit margin is significantly higher on hardbacks, but I’d be curious to know exact figures. What I’m wondering is whether, if all new releases were in paperback, the sales (in terms of revenue, not units sold) would be the same or greater than our current system. This is one of those situations where I’m ignorant about the business side of publishing, so if you have answers, please share.

Here’s the thing: I love books, and I buy way more of them than my income should allow for. I support buying books, and buying them often, and buying the books of people who are hardworking and good literary citizens and wicked awesome people. However, I actually cringe upon seeing that a hardback novel is $30. Thirty dollars? That’s two weeks worth of gas; nearly a week’s worth of groceries; ten lattes; three pairs of men’s jeans; 2-3 months worth of cat food; a nice bottle of whiskey to last through Spokane’s 4-6 months of winter…you get the idea. Do I value art more than I value those things? Maybe. But I could also buy two brand-new paperbacks for that price. Read more »

I have a semi-secret hobby that I think you should know about.

You may have heard whispers of it. Depending on the crowd you run with, you may have just rolled your eyes, assumed that it was idiotic, and moved on. And that’s okay, because I did the same thing for a few years. But once I was in, I was in, and now I’ve been involved with two of them per year for almost six years.

Two words, ladies and gents: Fantasy football.

Image by http://www.freefantasyfootballpicks.com.

The name makes it sound stupid, I know. Just the connotations of “fantasy” alone send your mind tumbling along some roads you don’t like. However, is the premise kind of ridiculous? Yep. Is it super fun? Yes. Does it make watching games more exciting and fun? Absolutely.

Let me run down how it works. For the purpose of this post, I’ll use fantasy football as an example, both because it’s wildly popular and because it’s way more fun than the other fantasy sports.

You form a league with a group of your friends. You hold a draft, either online or in person. You draft a team of current NFL players, and the “fantasy” season plays out based on the real NFL season. The number of players you draft for your team varies by league, but essentially you’d draft a certain number of players at each position: A quarterback. Three wide receivers. Two runningbacks. A tight end. A kicker. A defense. Then you’re allotted a certain number of bench players, say 6, and you can draft any combinations of positions you want for those bench spots. So you can draft players from any teams in the league, hence the term “fantasy”. Ideally, you’re putting together an all-star roster of some of the best players at each position, no matter what team they play for. And then as those players play each week, you root for them to do well, because when they do well, they earn you points. If your team earns more points than team owned by the person you’re playing each week, you win. And as in all things, winning is everything.

Again, you’re not drafting made-up players from made-up teams. This is not like a video game where you control what the players do and how they do it. You are drafting a team of players who you think will do well in real life. Based on their performance on the field in their real NFL games, your team gets points. Read more »