Be a planet, not a meteor.

Posted on June 11, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Advice to A Young Writer1. If possible, be Russian. And live in another country. Play chess. Be an active trader between languages. Carry precious metals from one to the other. Remind us of Stravinsky. Know the names of plants and flying creatures. Hunt gauzy wings with snares of gauze. Make science pay tribute. Have a butterfly known by your name.

2. Do not be awed by giant predecessors. Be ill-tempered with their renown. Point out flaws. Frighten interviewers from Time. Appear in Playboy. Sell to the movies.

3. Use unlikely materials. Who would choose Pnin as hero, but how did we live before Pnin?

4. Delight in perversity. Put a noun into the dictionary. Now we recognize the Lolita at every corner, see her sucking sweetened milk through straws at every soda fountain, dream her through all our fantasies.

5. Burn pedants in pale fire. Accept no fashions. Be your own fashion. Do not rely on earlier triumphs. Be new at each appearance.

6. Age indomitably, in the European manner. Do not finish your labours young. Be a planet, not a meteor. Honor the working day. Sit at your desk.”
– Vladimir Nabokov
criticism, reminiscences, translations and tributes

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Art from pain

Posted on June 10, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

I have to admit that I have a bit of the old PTSD from my hospital experiences, but I was intrigued by this multi-artist project.

At Colossal: In Los Angeles, 70 artists transform a vacant hospital into a sprawling art experience.

What we were doing was rooted in that specific moment, but looking back, it also seems to resonate strongly with the present—particularly in terms of how we understand media, perception, and reality itself. This is something I’ve been thinking about again recently, especially with the renewed activity around Cabaret Voltaire. It brings into focus the extent to which earlier work now reads almost as a form of prefiguration. At the time, though, much of it was intuitive. We didn’t necessarily have a fully formed theoretical framework for what we were doing—we were artists, and we were working instinctively. It’s really only in retrospect that some of those ideas begin to take on a clearer shape and meaning.

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Exonym Atlas

Posted on June 9, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

An exonym is a place name used by outsiders—for example, English speakers using Germany for Deutschland. The Exonym Atlas explores how other languages name countries and groups those names by usage. Fascinating to see the derivations of names, which don’t always follow language families: for example, the Latin Germania gets picked up by English, Greek, Italian and Russian, variants on Allemagne (French) turn up in Spanish, Portuguese and Arabic, and the Slavic-in-origin Niemcy (Polish) gets picked up by Hungarian but not Russian or Bulgarian.

via MapRoom

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from this green earth

Posted on June 8, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

 

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Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop

Posted on June 7, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Statue of a Danish author Hans Christian Andersen
Artist: Jens Galschiøt
Location: Submerged in the harbor of Odense, the author’s birthplace. Odense harbor, Denmark.

“Never stop reading.”

It is part of an art installation that uses the rising and falling tides of the harbour to change how much of the statue is visible, symbolizing the author’s legacy and the timeless nature of stories.

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Current Rothko

Posted on June 6, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

I’m a big fan, so I love Current Rothko  which shows you a Rothko painting selected based on the current weather outside your location.

The site’s collection of 89 paintings are “each tagged with a color register, temperature, and mood so the search engine can match it to your moment, no matter where you are in the world.”

 

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“Shut up, Ghost of Karl Marx.”

Posted on June 5, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

“Shut up, Ghost of Karl Marx.”
https://static.existentialcomics.com/comics/TechBrosUtopia.png

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This will not spare you tears

Posted on June 4, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Once upon a time, Paco Pomet

* * * *

“You must, in order that it shall speak to you, take a thing during a certain time as the only one that exists, as the only phenomenon which through your diligent and exclusive love finds itself set down in the center of the universe and which in this incomparable place on that day the angels serve. This will not spare you tears, but will contribute to giving all your tears a meaning clearer and, so to speak, more transparent.”

~ Rilke

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We must not let the system control us

Posted on June 3, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

“If there is a hard, high wall and an egg that breaks against it, no matter how right the wall or how wrong the egg, I will stand on the side of the egg. Why? Because each of us is an egg, a unique soul enclosed in a fragile egg. Each of us is confronting a high wall. The high wall is the system which forces us to do the things we would not ordinarily see fit to do as individuals … We are all human beings, individuals, fragile eggs. We have no hope against the wall: it’s too high, too dark, too cold. To fight the wall, we must join our souls together for warmth, strength. We must not let the system control us — create who we are. It is we who created the system.”

― Haruki Murakami

 

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Best Novel of All Time

Posted on June 2, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

In the Guardian, Tom Gauld’s cartoon “on Middlemarch being voted the best novel of all time.”

 

 

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