A Different Stripe

Ecosocialism in the UK

Richard Greeman, the power behind the Victor Serge Society and translator of many of Serge's works, including Unforgiving Years, is presently on a speaking tour of Great Britain, discussing "Capitalist and Ecological Collapse: An Eco-socialist Solution." He says,

"There can be no future without a dream, no progress without the hope of Utopia. So let us then begin now by trying to imagine a technically feasible, ecologically sustainable post-capitalist future and visualizing historically possible roads leading to it. The ‘New Archimedes’ hypothesis  – based on theories of cybernetics, chaos, emergence and Castoriadis’ Content of Socialism – connects a historically proven lever of worker solidarity and a 21st Century philosophical fulcrum (planetary consciousness) and a global electronicplace to stand  (the Internet) where the billions can unite in solidarity in order to lift the earth before it succumbs to capitalist ecocide.”

to contact Richard Greeman about details of the the tour, email "eurojournalists at lapost dot net" and a preview of his book, Dangerous Shortcuts and Vegetarian Sharks can be found here. 

Details of the tour follow.

Casting the Runes by M.R. James

A gift from us this week before Halloween, the story that Olivia Laing recently called, "Scariest story ever, so horrifying that to this day I can't keep it in my house" and puts on par with stories by Bram Stoker and Stephen King. And perhaps more importantly, Edward Gorey selected it for his anthology, The Haunted Looking Glass.

Download "Casting the Runes" by M.R. James

Stumbling Upon Tove Jansson at Barnes and Noble

Arajane is reading a book a week. Last week she happened upon The Summer Book.

Occasionally I wander through the fiction section at Barnes & Noble looking for new editions from New York Review of Books Classics . . . I know I could just look at their website or search amazon or something, but I like the challenge of spotting the covers or the distinctive spines on the shelves. The other day, as Chris and I were searching the stacks, we spotted this book, and my first thought was, "Ooh, an NYRB I haven't seen!" and my second thought was, "What a pretty cover!" and my third thought was, "Holy Jesus F*[email protected], a book by Tove Jansson???!!!" And then my brain nearly exploded with excitement.

And did the book live up to her expectations? Find out here.

A grand re-naming, a birthday, and days of destruction

Congratulations to McNally Jackson Bookstore, née McNally Robinson, on its name change. Our very own Matt Weiland (take that Paris Review!) will be there discussing his new book and Names on the Land.

Today is also Vladimir Sorokin's birthday. If he were here in NY, no doubt he'd be happy to know that The Queue is printing this very moment—and that it's formatted with all the idiosyncrasies of the 2007 Russian edition of the book.

The 7th of August marks the day between the bombing of Hiroshima and the bombing of Nagasaki. If you miss those mourning days, you can always fast to remember the destruction of the temples in Jerusalem on Tisha b'Av (on August 9th).

Google cracks down on those LibraryThing pornographers

Tim Spaulding reports that he received a letter from the Google Adsense moral hygiene robot explaining that, unless LibraryThing removed the mature content  from its site, Google would terminate its enrollment in the program.

They gave one example, the LibraryThing.fr page for the Library of Congress Subject Heading (LCSH) "Erotic stories." No doubt some algorithm caught a few keywords, like "sex" or the common porn-word "Lolita."

Read the entire post.

In other LibraryThing news, the site is sponsoring a book pile photo contest. So far, all the photos seem to depict nice neat posed stacks of books. Let's see some candids, teetering messy piles. Piles with a little character.

Don't forget about the NYRB group at LibraryThing.

A month in the country with Colin Firth and Kenneth Branagh

Sam Jordison is getting to be our favorite Guardian blogger—if for no more than the simple reason that he writes so thoughtfully and at length about books we've happened to publish. Yesterday he used the occasion of the film adaptation of J.L. Carr's A Month in the Country being shown in London as part of a Booker film series to discuss the book on which it's based. He's nice enough to enumerate the book's virtues:

The story of the narrator's secret love for another man's wife and ongoing struggle to recover from the trauma of being a signaller in the first world war is moving. The rural setting is beguiling with its evocation of a lost world "at the end of the horse age" full of alarmingly plain speaking, but unfailingly generous Yorkshire folk. The writing is lovely too. It's as simple and rich as the countryside it describes ("ditches and roadside deep in grass, poppies, cuckoo pint, trees heavy with leaf, orchards bulging over hedge briars"), but shot through with a mordant wit that ensures the book has an edge to sharpen all that easy bucolic softness. Finally, there's also the added physical appeal of the slim volume itself - at least if you are lucky enough to have the splendid Quince Tree Press edition designed by the author himself.

Apparently the film adaptation doesn't quite do the book justice (full of eye-candy though it may be). We've never been able to see it. For the longest time it wasn't available in the US on VHS or DVD. Anybody know if it is now?