Actually, I helped a piece of Jess Larson’s wonderful art become the central component of a book cover, but let us not quibble.

As patient, long-time readers might know/remember, Jess Larson makes very cool art, including a fantastic series of girdles from several years back. There was a showing of her girdles at the PRCA back in 2006, and I had the chance to carefully photograph the show, posting many of the results on Flickr.

Zip ahead several years, and one of these photos caught the eye of the folks at Caketrain as they were looking for ideas for the cover of a new book they were publishing: Tongue party by Sarah Rose Etter. Some e-mails were traded, etc., etc., and Jess and I both happily agreed to have our work (her girdle, my photo of it) used for their cover.

One of the unexpected little treasures that was waiting for us when we got home from Arkansas this week was my copy of the book, and the cover (pictured above) is really wonderful. I love the texture they added as the background and the way they’ve incorporated the text. I haven’t actually read the thing yet, but the pre-press blurbs certainly sound wonderful and I look forward to adding it to my summer reading list!

Thanks to Jess for making such cool art, giving me such nifty things to take pictures of, and being generous about the use of her art in this new context. Thanks also to the kind folks at Caketrain for seeing the work and getting in touch, and for making such a cool cover out of it all. This is another neat example of the value of sharing work on-line with tools such as Flickr; without that none of this would have been possible. I’m not getting paid anything beyond my free copy of the book, but now a whole new set of people will see Jess’s art and my photography, and that’s quite fine in my humble opinion.

The cool part is that most of the photos are mine! This set on Flickr shows all the photos they used, although many of them actually look much better in the calendar. Their staff did a really great job of straightening, cropping, and adjusting the lighting on the shots that they used, and it really made the photos look really nice. Thanks to whoever did the excellent work! Christian Lindig informs me (see the comments) that the design work was done by Margot Behr. Thanks for the great work, Margot!

It was really weird when I first looked at the calendar, because I really wasn’t sure how many of the photos were mine. There were two or three that I immediately recognized as mine (like the image at the top), but there were quite a few indoor detail shots that seemed like the kind of thing that I’d take (like the dragon below), but which I didn’t really recognize. There were also several of buildings that could have been mine, but could have been taken by most anyone. Going through, them, though, I was able to determine that all but two were in fact mine. The cropping (and to a lesser degree the cleaning) that the Dagstuhl folks did often threw me as it sharpened the focus in cool ways that I hadn’t seen or thought of.

There are two photos in the calendar that aren’t mine, both taken in specific conditions that I’ve never been there for. One is a really cool panorama with a beautiful fresh coating of snow and the other is the grounds around the chapel in the summer.

While I realize that this is little more than incoherent link propagation (unlike my normally focussed prose-o-wonderment), hopefully pulling some of this fluff from the mighty tubes that connect us all will help clarify our various connections and communications.

A couple that our amazing progeny sent my way:

• How I failed the Turing test: How would you convince a random new IM contact that you were a person and not a bot? (Of course might wonder why you’d bother, but we’ll ignore that for now.)
• RIAA Declares Using Brain to Remember Songs is Criminal Copyright Infringement (satire): Fairly amusing piece on the “Music industry moguls remain willfully clueless” thread. I love how the authors felt the need to include “satire” in the title. Are we really that dim?

I’m not sure where I got this pointer from, but Bruce Schneier is exhorting people to “Steal This Wi-Fi” over on Wired. In a world where people expend tons of energy securing their wireless networks (and ISPs often require it of their customers), one of our major security experts chooses to keep his home wireless open. “To me, it’s basic politeness. Providing internet access to guests is kind of like providing heat and electricity, or a hot cup of tea.”

And in a vaguely related piece on security, a post from John Naughton on the dangers of publishing your bank details. Jeremy Clarkson, arch-conservative, petrol head, and (much to my dismay) highly amusing Top Gear presenter decided that the woo-haa was way overblown regarding the recent loss by British government officials of financial details of millions of people. So he published his bank details in his Sun column. According to the BBC, however, “Clarkson admitted he was ‘wrong’ after he discovered a reader had used the details to create a £500 direct debit to the charity Diabetes UK.” Oops.

Well, my tubes are definitely clearer. Thanks for the Q-tip.

The death of the book has been oft prophesied, and so far the old dear keeps hanging in there. Here Bill Janssen is quoted by Peter Brantley, suggesting that what the casualties may be are forms of content rather than forms of publishing.

Will the novel become a marginal form like opera?

In the hype around the Kindle, I haven’t noticed a mention of Monday’s NEA report, To Read or Not To Read. Seems much more interesting.

I’ve been saying for a few years that we are entering an age where textual fiction is becoming less and less significant, particularly for the canonical long text, the novel. The novel is a relatively recent innovation in entertainment, and the popular novel is a product of cheap production and distribution, thanks to the industrial revolution.

The delivery channels have multiplied, and the economics have changed. Television killed off the pulp magazine (and crippled the market for short stories). What would replace the novel? Something which would produce a ludic experience for hours at a time — a movie. But movies have not succeeded in killing off the novel. They’re too expensive and too complicated, and major players control the distribution channels. The best they could do was to absorb years of talents like Chandler and Faulkner.

But now we have kids who don’t read, the Web, game engines, and the writers’ strike. Game engines and machinima make it possible for writers to produce and direct their own work without actors or sets, for a relatively modest capitalization (a game machine). The Web provides free distribution. Kids provide a hungry audience. But the wild card here is the WGA strike. Suddenly all the folks who normally spend their days creating teleplays are looking for other outlets for their creative energies. Maybe write that novel they’ve been talking about? Maybe not. People like Rob Long (Cheers) are suddenly blogging. Maybe someone will tell them about machinima. We may be entering a twilight for the popular novel, perhaps relegating it to a niche more like opera.

Big ups to open… for the tip.