Amber Sparks
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Amazing New Collaborative Visual History of the U.S.
August 3, 2011
The Invention of the Internet, by Bobby McKenna
This is so cool. Seriously. Go to this site and click on every picture to see all the brilliant, riveting takes on history that make up this collaborative project. United States history told in pictures, in all our glory and all of our shame. We are a weird and complicated nation, and this project says that louder than words can. The Momentus Project site explains this project as:
A collaborative project in which a select group of designers, illustrators, and artists create visual interpretations of the most defining moments in United States history as a way of informing others of our proud, yet sometimes troubled and forgotten past.
Contributors hail from around the globe as the most defining moments in United States history have often had a radical effect on the world abroad.
H/t to NotCot.org.
Things To Read While May Lingers
May 31, 2011
Short Story Month 2011 is almost over, but so many sites have done amazing work promoting short stories and short story writers this month. Two to single out (and sorry for promoting one that I write for, but it’s not due to me that SSM ruled there): Matt Bell at his blog, and Christopher Newgent at Vouched Books. Between the two of them, these guys have provided a wealth of short stories, essays, and info that I’ll be going back to for a long long time to come. Thanks to both of you for all your hard work this month.
I loved this essay. Jessica Kane, thank you. I love (good) historical fiction and I love the blurred lines between history and memoir and interpretation and biography and fiction and I, too, am ” missing the gene others seem to have that makes them worry, when they read a novel, about what is true. ” I also have concerns about the maligning of historical fiction as some sort of sub-genre, as if all history weren’t fiction, as if all history weren’t interpretation, as if anything other than a rote recitation of dates and names and places was could be other than subjective, spun, partly conjecture.
Celebrate Pushkin’s birthday with Melville House! This offer makes me outstandingly happy:
To help you get into the spirit of the thing, Melville House is offering all of our Russian novellas at 50% off the retail price—for one day only. That includes Pushkin’s own Tales of Belkin, Tolstoy‘sThe Death of Ivan Ilych and The Devil, Dostoevsky‘s The Eternal Husband, Gogol’s How the Two Ivans Quarrelled, Turgenev‘s First Love, andMy Life by Anton Chekhov. Clicking on the titles above will take you directly to the book page.
I love this piece by Sarah Rose Etter at Matter Press. Love, love, love.
Have you been reading Everyday Genius this month? No? Shame on you. Go back and read, every single day. Genius abounds, just like the site promises.
Ezra Klein On Why We Won’t Always Be the Biggest
January 26, 2011 — 2 Comments
Ezra Klein was kind of uncomfortable with the same thing in the State of the Union address that I was kind of uncomfortable with last night: the zero-sum phrasing of our relative economic position in the world, and the idea that we have to be “the biggest.”
We don’t have to be, actually. We should be okay with that by now. It doesn’t mean anything bad for us, just as the global rise of China and India doesn’t have to mean anything bad for us. It’s just done being our turn. And if we keep trying to outdo China anyway, we’re going to end up doing stupid things like lowering wages and benefits for our workers in a futile attempt to compete in a race we can never win.
But let me turn it over to Mr. Klein, who does a much better job in explaining:
This bugged me last night, and it’s worth talking about today: One of the first big applause lines of the speech came when Barack Obama said, “For all the hits we’ve taken these last few years, for all the naysayers predicting our decline, America still has the largest, most prosperous economy in the world.” But as Matt Yglesias notes, soon, we won’t. China will. And that’s okay.
A decent future includes China’s GDP passing ours. They have many, many more people than we do. It’s bad for both us and them if the country stays poor. A world in which China becomes rich enough to buy from us and educated enough to invent things that improve our lives is a better world than one in which they merely become competitive enough to take low-wage jobs from us — and that’s to say nothing of the welfare of the Chinese themselves.
But perhaps it’s better to think of it in terms of Britain rather than China. Was the economic rise of the United States, in the end, bad for Britain? Or France? I don’t think so. We’ve invented a host of products, medicines and technologies that have made their lives immeasurably better, not to mention measurably longer. We’re a huge and important trading partner for all of those countries. They’re no longer even arguably No. 1, it’s true. But they’re better off for it.
Read the whole thing here.
Good Things to Read by People I Like
December 2, 2010
Steve Himmer wrote this fantastic riff on a familiar legend for Dark Sky.
Jen Gann wrote something that features buffalo and AMERICA. Check it out at American Short Fiction.
New Piece Up at For Every Year
September 13, 2010
As a huge history nerd, I’m completely obsessed with Crispin Best’s excellent literature/history project, For Every Year. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter. It’s just perfect. Dennis Cooper calls it “one of the most overlooked literary sites on the internet.”
Anyway, I was lucky enough to have Crispin accept my take on 1575. I’ve always been touched by poor Henri, Henry III of France. He seems, like so many monarchs, to have born at the wrong time. A quick teaser:
When he is born, his Medici mother will know from the first that she loves him the best. Chers yeux, she calls him. Precious eyes. His brothers will hate him for the soft ways he learns from her. She will teach him to read and write, to love art, to be wise and to wage but always despise war. Most of all, she will keep him a Catholic, even as he longs to rebel, to fall into Protestantism. She will keep him a Catholic and it will eventually kill him.
And my full piece, here.
Welcome to the Ancient City! Only available at Necessary Fiction.
September 1, 2010
Come join us as we excavate the Ancient City, only at Necessary Fiction. This is a very cool collaborative fictional history project, where writers work with found objects and an imagined city. No actual tools needed. Except your imagination, of course. Well, duh.
Tomorrow Check Your Necessary Fiction: You’ll Find A City There
August 31, 2010
Because I am your friendly September Writer-in-Residence there, and you’re going to want to check out this project I’m working on right from the get-go. You’re going to see some seriously amazing writing, on topics you couldn’t possibly dream up, by some seriously amazing writers.
What are we working on? Well, I don’t want to spoil it, but we’re creating a history. A city’s history. You’ll be spending the month of September at a dig site, learning about the inhabitants of the city throughout its history, about how they’re linked across the ages through the soil and sediment and sludge, about the things they treasured and the things they left behind. By the time September is done, we’ll have built a shared history far more interesting and three-dimensional than anything you could find in your textbooks.
So head over to Necessary Fiction tomorrow for your first look at the Ancient City. That’s all I’ll say for now.
“The Culture of the Western Enlightenment is Better”
August 26, 2010 — 4 Comments
Really worth-reading piece from Susan Jacoby on religious abuses and refusing to let the Right be the defenders of true Enlightenment values.
My Favorite Kind of History: The Dusty, Forgotten Kind
August 25, 2010
SEED Mag has a really neat slideshow up of artist Justine Cooper’s large-format photographs of the scientific collections at the American Museum of Natural History. Lots of old specimens in dusty back rooms, never-unwrapped fossils from a hundred years ago, even a closet full of old leopard skins.
All of this is especially cool since I’m in the middle of reading Melissa Milgrom’s Still Life, a totally creepy and fascinating book about taxidermy, much of it at the AMNH. Highly recommended.
Isn’t it Neat that Things Still Keep Getting Discovered?
August 17, 2010
Like this Koopa turtle?
Or this Civil War prison?
Or this temple near Le Mans?
I think that’s neat. I remember at about six or seven when I told my babysitter that (just like everyone my age) I was going to be an archeologist. She told me everything important had already been found, so what was the point?
Ha, Tiffany. Ha ha ha. And so there.
