Ron Nurwisah, Boy Reporter

Thanks to pal and author Brian Joseph Davis and Eye Weekly I got my hands on Yann Martel’s much anticipated follow-up to Life of Pi, Beatrice and Virgil, a few weeks early. I even got to chat about it a bit in Eye’s Pop Fiction Book Club. Part one, part two.

And because that’s not enough reading, a gang of us are tackling Colum McCann’s gorgeous novel Let the Great World Spin over at the Afterword Reading Society.

Finally, the second episode of Put This On is online. The web series is for guys who want “to dress like a grown-up”. This episode looks at shoes, their care, maintenance and what to look for in a great pair. No more will you wear those fugly cheap things you bought at the Aldo outlet store.

Check it out. They’re also on Facebook too.

I recently started following Maria Popova who tweets some amazing and interesting links as @brainpicker.

This year’s RRJ is mostly online and as usual there’s some great pieces in there. Read it on their site or pick it up at your local indie mag seller.

Finally, Adam Schwabe points to a great piece from writer and philosopher Alain de Botton of a world without airplanes.

From the piece:

In a future world without aeroplanes, children would gather at the feet of old men, and hear extraordinary tales of a mythic time when vast and complicated machines the size of several houses used to take to the skies and fly high over the Himalayas and the Tasman Sea.

The wise elders would explain that inside the aircraft, passengers, who had only paid the price of a few books for the privilege, would impatiently and ungratefully shut their window blinds to the views, would sit in silence next to strangers while watching films about love and friendship – and would complain that the food in miniature plastic beakers before them was not quite as tasty as the sort they could prepare in their own kitchens.

Photo of Washington International Airport 1941 from the Life Archive.

When my co-worker Jeremy passed this along I thought this was photoshopped. Nope. Apparently this phenomenon, dubbed “dirty thunderstorms,” sometimes happens when volcanos erupt.

Lightning & volcanoes, two ridiculous natural events together at last.

The photo is from the most recent explosion in Iceland.

Click through for a full-size image or go to the site for more crazy lightning-volcano stories.

One of the skills that people in journalism want to learn is how to use Twitter. Who knew that 140 character updates would be so hard for people who crank out hundreds of words a day?

Kidding, of course. Fortunately, those of you without a friendly and helpful Twitter expert to nudge can turn to a few great resources.

The blog Twitter Journalism has lots of great hints and tips on how to get the most out of the social media tool. Here’s a great top 10 list of pros and cons for Twitter and journalists. Here’s another one on how to verify Tweets while newsgathering.

The blog was started by Craig Kanalley of Breaking Tweets and the Huffington Post.

There is also the official media blog from Twitter that also points out lots of great practices from journalists and media types.

All this talk of e-books has me thinking about the possible decline of the bookshelf.

Russell Smith a few weeks back wrote about this very topic:

Book-walls are just aesthetic now, just an unusually dense wallpaper: We don’t really need them for consultation. I can probably find the complete text of most of them online within an hour. It’s the same for CDs: If you have the time to copy them all, you can throw them all away and buy music online for the rest of your life. In the future, we will live in ever-smaller houses with ever-larger TV screens, so you need all the wall-space you have. And all our books will be invisible, like our music: The sum total of our literary experience will be a list of file names on a grey plastic machine in a briefcase.

But of course, the bookshelf isn’t dead yet and there are still some stunning examples of bookshelf as art/decor/inspiration out there.

Design Sponge points us to artist Jane Mount’s gorgeous series of illustrations of people’s ideal bookshelves.

The one below speaks to me current fascination with whales and also has a bunch of books I quite love.

I’m also very fond of this one and

Of course, like Smith argues in his column, what we choose to display (and how we do it) can reveal a lot about ourselves. The New Yorker’s great books blog, the Book Bench, has a regular feature that psychoanalyzes people through their shelves.

Frankly, all this talk of the death of the bookshelf might be a bit premature. If Apartment Therapy can devote countless blog posts to the devilish problem of showing off all your books and refer to them as “the original modular furniture” (how trendy, how moderne) then I think we’ll be stuck with cheap Billy bookcases for a bit longer.

Pfft Foursquare and all their virtual ‘badges.’ We kicking it old-school with the original badge collectors. Boy Scouts!

Original image from the Library of Congress.

Thomas Pettitt on the Gutenberg Parentheses from Nieman Journalism Lab on Vimeo.

The Nieman Journalism lab has an interesting interview with Danish thinker Thomas Pettitt who argues that the internet might actually mark a return to a pre-Gutenberg society of sorts.

He posits the idea that the 15th-century to the 20th-century marked a sort of Gutenberg Parenthesis, an odd interregnum where print reigned supreme in our information culture.

Of course, prior to mass printing and literacy, information was spread more haphazardly through rumours, songs, poems, oral stories, etc. Printing changed this because books gave a solidity to facts that rumours spread orally didn’t.

From the piece:

And with regard to things like truth, or the things like the reliability of what you hear in the media, then I think, well, in a way we’re in for a bad time. Because there was a hierarchy. In the parenthesis, people like to categorize — and that includes the things they read. So the idea clearly was that in books, you have the truth. Because it was solid, it looked straight, it looked like someone very clever or someone very intelligent had made this thing, this artifact. Words, printed words — in nice, straight columns, in beautifully bound volumes — you could rely on them. That was the idea.

And then paperback books weren’t quite as reliable, and newspapers and newssheets were even less reliable. And rumors you heard in the street were the least reliable of all. You knew where you were — or you thought you knew where you were. Because the truth was that those bound books were probably no more truthful than the rumors you heard on the street, quite likely.

There are, of course, differences between 21st-century information culture and medieval Europe. Literacy and a lack of a central power (i.e. the Catholic Church) being two of them. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting idea and one that could shed a bit of light on our post-print age.

Despite all this talk about its death and decline, the book has a tight grip on our imaginations. Why else would e-book readers simulate the book-reading experience (that page-flip look and noise, book covers, etc.)? The book has talismanic qualities built by centuries of cultural history.

New York Times columnist Rob Walker, he writes the insightful Consumed column, is looking at the idea of the book. It’s a playful survey on how artisans, craft-makers and others play with the book form.

There are ‘pillow-books,’ edible books, book planters and more. All these projects, of course, tap into our very strong psychic attachments to books, both in form and content.

Photo: Artist Thomas Allen uses old pulp novels in his work. More from the Foley Gallery.

Clay Shirky has another great essay out that I’m still taking time to digest. It argues that radical change causes complex systems to collapse because they’re unable to change. Not because they don’t want to but because their complexity causes them to lock up.

Complex societies collapse because, when some stress comes, those societies have become too inflexible to respond. In retrospect, this can seem mystifying. Why didn’t these societies just re-tool in less complex ways? The answer Tainter gives is the simplest one: When societies fail to respond to reduced circumstances through orderly downsizing, it isn’t because they don’t want to, it’s because they can’t.

Mathew Ingram also sums it up on Gigaom.

Poet Edward Carson argues that our familiarity with the internet is changing the shape of non-fiction.

David Sasaki, over at the PBS Idealab looks at why curation is becoming more important in today’s news environment.

Finally, some eye candy: A gallery of Penguin covers sorted by decade.