If we’ve learned anything from talking owls with scholar’s caps and glasses, it’s that glasses mean you’re smart. If you’re a talking owl, this qualifies you for work as a Tootsie Pop pusher, a child safety demonstrator puppet, or even a prolific career as a model for stock images. If you’re bespectacled Britpop star Jarvis Cocker, people will be less impressed by your human vocal chords, but they will likely still be into your witty, incisive lyrics and your charming performance in Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox. (Foxes!!!! It’s a movie where foxes wear clothes!!!!) And then those people will think, “We need an editor-at-large for our prestigious music books division. Smart people like books, yes? Smart people wear glasses, no? You know who loves boogieing down and has glasses and also a high level of literacy? OWLS.” But then all the owls were filming that movie with the fake Celtic-sounding names where owls save the Owl World and sing songs about sharing and learn about friendship or whatever. (I don’t know, the Wikipedia was really long and I couldn’t make myself read it). So instead they hired Jarvis Cocker.
Okay, so Mr. Pulp has done some editorial work before. This summer Cocker was chosen to guest edit the poetry submissions to The Mays Anthology, a collection of work by students at Oxford and Cambridge. And now he has been hired on at famed UK publishing house Faber & Faber, where he’ll work with editors Lee Brackstone and Hannah Griffiths to select titles from a small list of potential Faber music publications. The publishing house is also printing Cocker’s Mother, Brother, Lover, a collection of lyrics and commentary, next week. Faber & Faber’s upcoming music-related publications include yet another Julian Cope outing called (of course) Copendium, and a memoir by James Fearnley a.k.a. the guy who played accordion in The Pogues. Also joining Jarvis Cocker on Faber & Faber’s ever-expanding list of Fancy Employees will be Mystic River author Dennis Lehane and chef/travel show host/my kinda creepy older man crush Anthony Bourdain.
• Jarvis Cocker: http://www.jarviscocker.net
• Faber & Faber: http://www.faber.co.uk
