Custom Coffee Table Acts as Giant Nintendo Controller Charles Lushear of custom design studio The Boho Workbench in Venice Beach, California, has created this fully functional Nintendo Controller Coffee Table. The table (which is 42″ x 18.25″ x 18″) ditches plastic in favor of maple, mahogany and walnut, and lets you play NES games using the aesthetically designed piece of furniture. It features a removable glass top for when you aren’t playing games, a retractable cord, dovetail joinery and mid century modern legs. A nonfunctional version is available, as well as a composite materials version that is painted to look exactly like the original controller. USB capability can also be added, and the designer is currently working on an inverted color scheme version and one with Wii capability for those without a NES console. The coffee tables are made to order and the production time is 4-6 weeks. The Boho Workbench
The Riddle Of Mark Twain's Passion For Joan Of Arc On a December night in 1905, the New York City chapter of the Society of Illustrators managed to do something many thought impossible. With one calculated stroke they left Mark Twain, author and noted quipster, speechless. The writer had just risen to address the group. As he began to speak, a girl emerged from the back of the room. Her hair was cropped just below her ears; her face was angular but radiant. When the writer finally spoke, he did so slowly, carefully. “Now there's an illustration, gentlemen — a real illustration. Mark Twain’s obsession with Joan of Arc has to rank among the most baffling and least talked about enigmas in American literature. The same might also be said of his book about the French heroine. Take the following passage, drawn from the book’s climactic trial scenes: Of course I had been expecting such news every day for many days; but no matter, the shock of it almost took my breath away and set me trembling like a leaf. The story went something like this: Mrs.
I like words When copywriter Robert Pirosh landed in Hollywood in 1934, eager to become a screenwriter, he wrote and sent the following letter to all the directors, producers, and studio executives he could think of. The approach worked, and after securing three interviews he took a job as a junior writer with MGM. (Source: Dear Wit.) Dear Sir:I like words. I like fat buttery words, such as ooze, turpitude, glutinous, toady. Philip Larkin complete by Michael Dirda Is Philip Larkin a great poet? Ask most literate readers and the answer is an enormous yes. But detractors still complain that he is a Johnny One-Note, sour about life and unduly obsessed with “the solving emptiness/ That lies just under all we do.” Near his writing desk Larkin kept the dozen poets he most loved: Hardy, Wordsworth, Ch ...
Hand Crafted Typographic Comic Book-Inspired Shazam Table Displaying a striking typographic design, this coffee table embodies the love for comic books and their wonderful other-worldly feeling – the Shazam Table composes an appealing atmosphere tinted with a little bit of of magic. Imagined by EViL ED and Dan Robotic of Evil Robot Designs – an artistic duo creating spectacular furniture pieces that sit at the border between geek and cool – the Shazam Table was hand crafted in solid American Walnut and finished with a light gloss oil. Resting on stained black oak feet, the table was inspired by comic book sound effects and beautifully integrated within contemporary settings. Hollow on the inside, the walnut coffee table filters light and casts shadow through its 40 cm high carefully cut body – a modern interpretation of our culture seen through the eyes of its creators. The bespoke coffee table measures 100 cm in length and is 40 cm wide – why now take a tape measure and see where it would fit in your home?
Ernest Hemingway: How the great American novelist became the literary equivalent of the Nike swoosh Ernest Hemingway would be aghast to see what has become of Ernest Hemingway. Against the gray obscurity that awaits most writers in death, his image, 50 years later, has become the literary equivalent of the Nike swoosh or golden arches. Who doesn’t have a mental picture of the gray beard and safari shirt? Who couldn’t vamp a Hemingway-like sentence in a pinch? The Hemingway of these portraits (the least absurd of them, anyway) is the Hemingway that comes through in his best-known stories: a virile, intense man of hard-living habits and a few brilliantly selected words. That’s no coincidence. A mistake that people tend to make in reading, praising, teaching Hemingway is to assume that he was foremost a stylist. Hemingway is due for reappraisal partly because his gamey, war-seeking, booze-quaffing corpus seems today quixotically out of sync with our twee and environmentally aware era; the Hemingway we think we know is a Zeus-hued action figurine from another time and place.
Unusual Words Rendered in Bold Graphics by Maria Popova A visual A-Z of the hidden treasures of language. As a lover of language and words, especially obscure and endangered words, I was instantly besotted with Project Twins’ visual interpretations of unusual words, originally exhibited at the MadArt Gallery Dublin during DesignWeek 2011. Acersecomic A person whose hair has never been cut. Biblioclasm The practice of destroying, often ceremoniously, books or other written material and media. Cacodemonomania The pathological belief that one is inhabited by an evil spirit. Dactylion An anatomical landmark located at the tip of the middle finger. Enantiodromia The changing of something into its opposite. Fanfaronade Swaggering; empty boasting; blustering manner or behavior; ostentatious display. Gorgonize To have a paralyzing or mesmerizing effect on: Stupefy or petrify Hamartia The character flaw or error of a tragic hero that leads to his downfall. Infandous Unspeakable or too odious to be expressed or mentioned. Jettatura Ktenology Leptosome Welter
The great bad writer Self-indulgent, vulgar, borderline insane—Edgar Allan Poe was the most influential American author of the 19th century John Cusack in The Raven: One of Poe’s gifts was to create small, imperishable images that have wormed their way into our collective psyche Thirty-odd years ago, the American beer company Stroh advertised its product with a cartoon poster depicting a gloomy, black-clad fellow in early middle age, surrounded by ghouls, bells and a ghastly raven with a wicked grin. The caption: “Edgar Allan Stroh.” So when, in March, Universal Pictures releases The Raven, a serial-killer romp with John Cusack playing the author as an amateur detective, it should not expect any problems with brand recognition. American literature came of age in the 19th century, and quite soon produced a remarkable crop of masters. This dual triumph is all the more improbable when you reflect that, by most standards, Poe was not a very good writer. No one has ever settled the question for good.
1984 v. Brave New World In October of 1949, a few months after the release of George Orwell's dystopian masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he received a fascinating letter from fellow author Aldous Huxley — a man who, 17 years previous, had seen his own nightmarish vision of society published, in the form of Brave New World. What begins as a letter of praise soon becomes a brief comparison of the two novels, and an explanation as to why Huxley believes his own, earlier work to be a more realistic prediction. Fantastic. Trivia: In 1917, long before he wrote this letter, Aldous Huxley briefly taught Orwell French at Eton. (Source: Letters of Aldous Huxley; Image: George Orwell (via) & Aldous Huxley (via).) Wrightwood.
Popular Writers: A Stephen King interview. I interviewed Stephen King for the UK Sunday Times Magazine. The interview appeared a few weeks ago. The Times keeps its site paywalled, so I thought I'd post the original version of the interview here. (This is the raw copy, and it's somewhat longer than the interview as published.) I don't do much journalism any more, and this was mostly an excuse to drive across Florida back in February and spend a day with some very nice people I do not get to see enough. I hope you enjoy it.Edit to add - the Sunday Times asked me to write something small and personal about King and me for the contributors' notes, and I wrote this: “I think the most important thing I learned from Stephen King I learned as a teenager, reading King's book of essays on horror and on writing, Danse Macabre. “Meeting Stephen King this time, the thing that struck me is how very comfortable he is with what he does. The first time I met Stephen King was in Boston, in 1992. “If I had my life over again,” said King. “No.
Shell' Game - April 24, 2012 Shell' GameReconsidering Percy Bysshe Shelley's work through a new lens. The exhibition “Shelley’s Ghost: The Afterlife of a Poet,” now at the New York Public Library, is the sort of exhibit that doesn’t necessarily tell you anything you didn’t already know about this poet’s short and messy life. What it does do, by virtue of placing the manuscripts and artifacts into a relatively confined space (the smallish gallery to the left of the main exhibition room on the ground floor of the Library), is give us the facts in a more concentrated and vivid way than we might otherwise receive them. The exhibit demonstrates, with dramatic succinctness, that Percy Bysshe Shelley and some of those he hung out with were pretty shitty people. I’m not talking about the sort of shittiness that we associate with, say, Ezra Pound or Martin Heidegger, whose politics were repugnant. No one likes a fascist, at least in the abstract. Shelley’s back-story is also succinctly presented here.
On the poetry of Sylvia Plath We read poetry because we love it but also because we sense, in some indefinable way, that it’s good for us. It sensitizes us, makes us more aware, opens us up, keeps us sharp – doesn’t it? Lately I’ve had some doubts. Can poetry be bad for you? example, poetry that makes you feel like death. Even the most cursory reading of (1965), the posthumous collection that constitutes Plath’s primary claim on our attention, will turn up lines that freeze the blood: I am a garden of black and red agonies. “Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices” Nightly it flaps out Looking, with its hooks, for something to love. “Elm” A small white soul is waving, a small white maggot. “Event” What a thrill – My thumb instead of an onion. (“Cut”) For all the variety of interpretation that Plath’s work has occasioned, almost everyone who has written about her testifies to a similar sense of shock. But how can you really “like” a poem such as “Edge,” which reads like the suicide note that it in some sense is? Her dead A red