Miranda July is a filmmaker, performing artist and writer. She grew up in Berkeley, California where she began her career by writing plays and staging them at the local punk club. July’s videos, performances, and web-based projects have been presented at sites such as the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim Museum and in the 2002 and 2004 Whitney Biennials. Her short fiction has been published in The Paris Review, Harper’s, and The New Yorker, and a collection of stories is forthcoming from Scribner in May 2007. more >>

Miranda July has a new book published it seems. I never heard of her and have no idea if the book is good bad or indifferent. but I imagine it might be good, because Miranda is obviously highly creative. I wouldn’t often praise a website made entirely of images – you’d more likely hear me rant on about findability and the like.

But the website for Miranda’s book of short stories “No One Belongs Here More Than You” is entirely comprised of images and yet is wonderfully compelling and I looked at every page.

Check it out.

When Bif was still an integral part of BifSniff.com we discussed doing a children’s book, but the idea just never really solidified or took off. However, over on his new blog, Bif has resurrected the concept and is publishing the chapters online. Go there and read it.

He mentions that he feels it’s unlikely he’ll publish in any traditional form, but I hope he changes his mind.

As for unsolicited feedback, well I was always a big fan of the concept, and the first chapter is great so if the rest of it follows through I’d definitely buy it. For myself.

Because I’d personally like to see it published in a traditional form, I hope Bif keeps traditional formats in mind somewhat. I wonder what rough age group he has in mind, if any. I don’t hold with patronising kids books, but some of the vocabulary he’s using currently is pretty advanced.

If Bif is still thnking along the lines of a picture book, I think it might benefit to simplify some of the vocabulary while maintaining the complexity of the writing through the sentence structure.

Of course, there’s nothing wrong with a kids book aimed at adults either, or maybe he’s thinking more of an early/mid teen age group.

As for the subject matter, a book about Death for kids is definitely a winner as far as I’m cocerned. As it happens, just today I saw a French kids book which featured Death – ‘Le canard, la mort et la tulipe’ features Death visiting a duck in it’s last moments of life.

The concepts and styles of the books are very different really, but for showing precedent to squeamish publishers the French picture book might well be a handy tool!

‘Le canard, la mort et la tulipe’ is available from the French Amazon site for €14.14, the pictures are beautiful, the depiction of Death is wonderful and the words… are in French.

Somebody please publish an English translation while I wait for Bif to finish his book!

Just finished reading ‘The Corner‘ by David Simon and Edward Burns. Can’t recommend it enough. The book is about people living in West Baltimore, caught up in the drug corners, either through addiction or dealing or by proximity to both.

It’s takes a long hard look at the so-called ‘Drug War’ in America and the effect it has really had.

David Simon was a Baltimore Sun crime reporter, he wrote a book called ‘Homicide: A Year on the Killing Streets‘, for which he spent a year embedded with the police, and it was made into a tv series. He then went on to co-author ‘the Corner’ with Edward Burns, a teacher in Baltimore who had served 20 years in the police department.

David Simon met Edward Burns, in or around 1985, when he was looking for sources within the Baltimore Police department for an article on a drug trafficker called ‘Little’ Melvin Williams. Simon was obviously impressed by Burns, and when Burns left the police force, Simon says it just made sense to collaborate on ‘The Corner’. Simon convinced Burns to put off getting his teaching qualification for a year after he retired from the force, so that they could write ‘The Corner’ together.

The two went on to create ‘the wire‘ – which both myself and Bif are big fans of. In fact, I was given it for Christmas by a friend of mine who knows what a huge fan of ‘The Wire’ I am (thanks Eoin!!).

As an aside, ‘Little’ Melvin Williams did time, came out with religion and got a part in ‘The Wire’!

I launched into reading the book without even reading the cover, and I was about two thirds of the way through the book when I came to some photographs of the characters and realised, on inspecting the cover, that it’s a true story.

Simon and Burns actually spent that year on the corners in West Baltimore writing what actually happened to these people.

It reads so well, and contains such fascinating material that I had assumed it was fiction. The stories are also interweaved exceptionally well with social commentary that doesn’t interrupt the reading of the book the way you might expect.

The book gives an amazing insight into the lives of these people, and in the case of the drug addicts, allowing you to empathise with a way of life that we have become used to boiling down to a two dimensional caricature. The book also examines the politics which have failed these people, and calls for change.

If you have been watching the Wire at all, this is a great companion piece as it gives a more full understanding of the way of life in West Baltimore, and it’s also interesting to note some of the inspiration perhaps for characters or events in ‘The Wire’.

‘The Corner’ was made into a mini-series which I would like to see – if anyone knows where to get it, do let me know!