Microlibraries, Herzog at Comic-Con, Dull Books, and More Literary Links

- Flavorwire lists the hottest scenes in literature. Not sexy hot, but crippling heatwave hot.

- Apparently the new hip literary thing in San Francisco is microlibraries. That is, very small members only libraries that hope to fill in for underfunded public libraries:

While these experiments in micro-libraries may be modest, they are full of personal touches missing in the conventional library settings.

For instance, Mission Local Eatery’s librarians are not offended if books come back smeared with ingredients, since they’re supposed to be used in the kitchen anyway. Kearns makes tea and coffee for visitors to Ourshelves, and is considering opening it up to people who need a cozy place to write during the day.

(h/t The Rumpus)

- Filmmaker Werner Herzog was spotted at Comic-Con.

“I have never seen the collective dreams all in one place,” said Mr. Herzog, who claims to have expected men in suits — business suits — when he heard the term “convention.

- Here is a great collection of amazingly boring and curious book titles. I’ll post some of my favorites on the right. (h/t Boing Boing)

- Tony Perrottet suggests that as a writer you’d be better off going to jail than goofing off on the internet:

Who can stick with the blank page when the click of a mouse opens up a cocktail party of chattering friends, a world-class library, an endless shopping mall, a game center, a music festival and even a multiplex? At once-remote literary colonies, writers can now be spotted wandering the fields with their smartphones, searching for reception so they can shoot off a quick Facebook update. These days, Walden Pond would have Wi-Fi, and Thoreau might spend his days watching cute wildlife videos on YouTube. And God knows what X-rated Web sites the Marquis de Sade would have unearthed.

- At the Millions, Gary Percesepe writes about meeting Ayn Rand’s editor.

- Does the rise of e-books mean authors will start “e-signing” books? The idea is so stupid it will probably happen:

The technology is straightforward enough — readers sign in using Twitter, and select the book which they would like ‘signed’ (authors, or their publishers, have to opt in to have their books featured). The request is then forwarded to the author who — using Docusign‘s API — can write a short message and digitally sign it. The signed message is then forwarded to the reader’s Kindle, as a separate file.

- Lastly, in The Atlantic’s fiction issue John Barth discusses the anxiety of originality:

FULL DISCLOSURE: MY remarks on this subject have quite possibly been made by me before, in other contexts. When the eminent Italian critic and novelist Umberto Eco visited Johns Hopkins some decades ago, he spoke of the problem, for contemporary writers, of the “already said”: the circumstance that because Homer, for example, spoke so memorably in The Odyssey of the “wine-dark sea” and of “rosy-fingered Dawn,” nearly 3,000 years’ worth of poets and storytellers have had to find other images for sea and sunrise—a task that must become increasingly difficult as the repertory of possibilities is exhausted.

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