Listen to Ted Hughes read.

Listen to Ted Hughes read a selection of his poems for children.

[via The Guardian]

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“Roads”

Portishead performing “Roads” from the NYC concert.

[via YouTube]

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Rereading Camera Lucida

Over at the Guardian, a great article about Roland Barthes’s brilliant Camera Lucida.

If there are critical legacies to Camera Lucida, the first is probably its insistence (not as obvious as it seems) that photographs are always photographs of something. The book’s more penetrating influence has certainly to do with photography and mortality: both the memorial uses to which photographs have long been put – one thinks of Victorian mourning portraits, or the profusion of post-9/11 mementos – and the vertigo we can feel in the face of even the most vivid and living subject. But few of Barthes’s heirs – and Batchen’s essay collection reprints three decades’ worth of critical appraisal and envy of Camera Lucida – have ever reproduced or fully accounted for the strange air of searching and susceptibility that permeates his brief “note”. As the art critic Martin Herbert has put it, “I don’t go looking for ‘ideas about photography’ in that book; I read it for a certain kind of vulnerability.”

Hit the link to read the full article.

[via The Guardian]

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Cover!

 

Haruki Murakami, 1Q84; Knopf, 2011.

The cover for Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 has been revealed. It is pretty okay.

[via Amazon]

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Rojak: The Universal Sigh

Rojak is a weekly collection of assorted links as well as a bulletin summarising the week on this blog.

Assorted

Art for Japan. [via Tsunami]

Finalists for the 2011 Best Translated Book Award over at Three Percent. [via Three Percent]

Radiohead to release free newspaper (not in Singapore though, sadly!). [via The Universal Sigh]

Pitchfork will stream LCD Soundsystem’s final show from Madison Square Garden on April 2. [via Pitchfork]

Rare EP reissues on Record Store Day include Sonic Youth and Derek and the Dominos. [via Consequence of Sound]

An essay by Bolaño taken from the forthcoming Between Parentheses. [via NYRB]

Bulletin

This week on WKLC:

• Charles Mingus.
• PJ Harvey.
• Review of Between Parentheses.
• Chris Saunders.
• Mario Vargas Llosa.
• Box of Vision x Bob Dylan.

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Omnivore: I’ve just seen a face…

Omnivore is a brief weekly report on some of the things that I’ve been enjoying during the week.

This week, I finished The City & The City, Samir El-Youssef’s The Illusion of Return, and five plays by Yukio Mishima.

I also rewatched Fantastic Mr. Fox last week. I absolutely adore that film.

Been back at the Beatles for various reasons this week.

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“The Last Living Rose” Video

The video for PJ Harvey’s “The Last Living Rose”, off of the new album Let England Shake. [via YouTube]

Directed by Seamus Murphy.

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Between Parentheses Review

Roberto Bolaño, Between Parentheses, New Directions, 2011; edited by Ignacio Echevarria; translated by Natasha Wimmer. Source: Amazon.

A review of Between Parentheses, the collection of assorted non-fiction material by Roberto Bolaño, can be found over at Three Percent.

While Bolaño presumably never intended these writings to stand in lieu of a more cohesive autobiographical work (which, given the sentiments contained within the book, is not something he was ever likely to have penned in any proper way), it is nonetheless all we as readers are left with to make sense of him as an individual and lover of great fiction.

Read more at the link. [via Three Percent]

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Mario Vargas Llosa’s Nobel Lecture

An excerpt:

Literature is a false representation of life that nevertheless helps us to understand life better, to orient ourselves in the labyrinth where we are born, pass by, and die. It compensates for the reverses and frustrations real life inflicts on us, and because of it we can decipher, at least partially, the hieroglyphic that existence tends to be for the great majority of human beings, principally those of us who generate more doubts than certainties and confess our perplexity before subjects like transcendence, individual and collective destiny, the soul, the sense or senselessness of history, the to and fro of rational knowledge.

Read it by hitting the link. Also in the original Spanish.

[In English]

[In Spanish]

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Box of Vision’s “Bob Dylan Archive”

If you have money to spend (and I don’t), then you might want to consider investing in one of these lovely boxes. [Video via YouTube]

The Showcase Box: a beautiful, linen covered, table-top slipcase, featuring a new print of a classic Bob Dylan photo on the front, huge “BOB DYLAN” name and logos debossed in black foil print on the spines and back, and a magnetic closure for storing:

1) A unique book built specifically for organizing and displaying Bob Dylan’s entire chronological catalog of CD albums. (CD’s not included…insert your own, then fill in the missing pieces of your collection).

2) The most comprehensive collection of full size Bob Dylan LP artwork ever (from 1962’s Bob Dylan through 2009’s Christmas In The Heart), digitally restored and available together for the first time, in a 220 page book of LP sized reproductions.

3) A unique discography of Bob Dylan’s album catalog, with excerpts from historical reviews and new reproductions of classic advertisements, spanning Bob Dylan’s entire career.

Preorder at the site [link].

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