A barrage of art/book links

Le Mont Solaire
Mont Saint-Michel, 2006

Things are getting away from me, so here’s a list of especially good art & book links I’ve collected from the past week.

One of my favorite blogs, Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society, posts about a stunning giant sundial constructed at Mont Saint-Michel, off the French coast. This video, “Le Mont Solaire”, from the project website, shows the sundial in action. The hours are indicated by reflective panels in the sand, while the spire of the abbey itself is the gnomon (the pointer casting the moving shadow).

Proceedings also has a fascinating but disturbing post on books bound in human skin. Apparently the term for this is anthropodermic bibliopegy. (Because we really, really needed a special term just for this.)

In the “disturbing books” category, our runner-up is this post from Street Anatomy about a renowned anatomical atlas whose illustrations may have been based on the dissected bodies of Holocaust victims.

3 quarks daily is like that fascinating but garrulous friend whom you find yourself dizzily talking to until 3am, despite knowing you’ll go to work the next morning sleep-deprived and sallow. I can barely keep up with its feed. In the past week or so it’s called my attention to Bookforum’s review of A Natural History of Pragmatism by Joan Richardson, which scared me, as I did not realize Jonathan Edwards went to Yale (trust me, that’s scary for personal reasons); and a truly enjoyable NY Review of Books article on Shakespeare and power, by Stephen Greenblatt, and an article on atheism and academe that I’ll have more to say on later.

Then there’s novelist Jonathan Lethem, currently popping up all over the blogosphere with interesting things to say. He’s chatting with Janna Levin at Seed , interviewed at Salon , and, if you are really interested in his perspectives on plagiarism, copyright, and creativity, you could read Lethem’s 12-page article “The Ecstasy of Influence” from the February Harper’s (which, alas, when I went to get it, has disappeared into the subscribers-only realm. Harper’s redid their website on April 1, so any old links you have may no longer work).

I don’t begrudge Harper’s their subscription fees – I’ve been meaning to subscribe for a while, but it’s ostentatiously ironic that Lethem’s article on the future of open source (and how he’s giving away film rights to his latest work) is now behind a paywall. Naughty Harper’s!

Update: Harper’s has fixed the Lethem link already (see comment below). I take the naughty thing back.

And over at the Valve, Amardeep Singh suggests peer review for blogs. Read the comments, too; they touch on some of the major problems with peer review in general, and the fundamental differences between blogging and formal publishing, which reminds me that Bruce Sterling has, if you missed it, given blogs only 10 years to live. Uh-oh. I’ll never be caught up with all the things I want to post by then. But it will be nice when my feeds dwindle to some manageable number – so I can read my New Yorker backlog. These days, life is TMI.