We dropped by the annual Cut-Price Book Sale at the nearest National Bookstore. As usual we weren’t looking for anything and we ended up buying something.
This was too good to pass up:
A Taschen book featuring works by Caravaggio, Claesz, Dürer, Arcimboldo and others. Beautiful full-color plates. Original price P735 (which is low for a hardcover art book), sale price P441.
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Interesting entries for LitWit Challenge 6.5: Make rust beautiful.
crucial would win if this were a high school honors class.
red the mod would win if this were a purple-ness contest.
theOrbiter would win if this were an art criticism class.
fishy would win in a rhyming competition.
sad_ism wins for sheer geekiness. Congratulations, sad_ism! Please post your full name in Comments (it won’t be published) and we’ll alert you when your prize is ready.
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History is written by the victors, and books and movies are generally told from the hero POV. (Notable exceptions: Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment, Meursault in The Stranger, and Grendel in Grendel, John Gardner’s retelling of Beowulf.) Let’s play with that.
Your assignment this week: Let the “villain”: tell the story. For instance, Alien as told by the alien, Terminator from the terminator’s POV, The Lord of the Rings as told by Sauron (a Russian novelist already did the orc version), King Lear by Edmund, Sense and Sensibility according to the sister-in-law, or The Age of Innocence by Newland Archer’s wife whatshername. Your choice.
As always, 1,000-word maximum. Deadline: 11.59pm on Sunday, 7 August 2011. The chosen villain story gets these.
Two disturbing books: Postsecret for the anonymous contributors’ confessions, Hotel Iris for the twisted love story.
The Weekly LitWit Challenge is brought to you by our friends at National Bookstore.
Close-up of a sunspot from the NASA Astronomy Picture of the Day archive.
2. It is hot and humid in Manila so we sweat a lot. In order to stay cool and refreshed we take baths or showers every day, if not two or three times a day. If those of us who were born and raised here find it hot, it must be positively infernal for those of you from America, Europe, Australia-NZ and the temperate zone!
You must shower every day, if not several times a day. For maximum refreshment we recommend generous applications of soap, shampoo, and antiperspirants. Just dousing yourself in cologne is not enough to cool you down. Take a shower every day, you’ll feel so much better.
We insist.
Read Basic Etiquette for Expats, Tourists and Other Visitors to the Philippines, including Extraterrestrials, my column in interaksyon.com.
What could lure us out of the house on a rainy Sunday afternoon best spent at home in bed with the NYRB edition of Fortunes of War, The Balkan Trilogy by Olivia Manning, with breaks for ensaymada and hot chocolate?
Chris Evans, that’s what! We’re all Chris Evans fans—some of us since Cellular, some since the singularly non-fantastic Fantastic Four, and myself since Sunshine, the Danny Boyle movie in which they fly to the sun to turn it back on. Our admiration of Chris has survived stuff like The Loss of A Teardrop Diamond, London, The Losers—which had me a little worried because he was playing the third banana, and that psychic powers movie where Dakota Fanning wiped the floor with him. But with Captain America Chris is back in the lead, in the title role, in a hit which would beget a franchise if it weren’t obviously a trailer for The Avengers.
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