THE CURRENT DILEMMA
Kim Addonizio
Everyone’s trying to figure out where to go next.
California was good until some of it was swept
into a furnace, the rest suspended next to a target
over a carnival dunk tank. Nothing is good forever,
not even a thing of beauty, no matter what Keats said
about joy in that really long poem I could never finish.
Chocolate was good, especially dark, now they’ve found
cadmium and lead. Eggs were cheap, then pricey,
then astronomical, as in probably cheaper on Mars
where no one wants to go except one megarich clodpole.
New Orleans was good but then it snowed in New Orleans
and those levees won’t last forever, either. Today
the White House announced reality was canceled
once again, maybe to be reinstated when the Styx
freezes over. I spent the day alone in my friend’s house
in the Arizona desert. Wandering from room to room,
asking the mountains, Are you my mother? I wonder
where she went after hospice care, if she joined
the few souls flitting from that armless saguaro
to the dying mesquite tree by my friend’s pretty pool
she never swims in, fluffing their wings as they settle
and coo. Detroit is supposed to be good in fifty years
but I’ll be dead then and if I lived there now, I might want
to be dead. Everyone wants to breathe
but it’s getting more difficult, all those boots crushing
everyone’s tracheas, all those trolls under the bridges
trying to devour us as we bleat our alarm. Baaa! I’m bleating now.
The mountains reassure me but the sun’s going down.
Soon I’ll be left with nothing but stars, some of them
fake, space filling with satellites while the blazing
bodies drift farther away and the moon
trails hopelessly after them, crying for love.
May I say now at once that I will not tolerate any tinkering with the personal nomenclature. Nor with the name/word Hobbit. I will not have any more Hompen (in which I was not consulted), nor any Hobbel or what not. Elves, Dwarfs/ves, Trolls, yes: they are mere modern equivalents of the correct terms. But hobbit (and orc) are of that world, and they must stay, whether they sound Dutch or not… If you think I am being absurd, then I shall be greatly distressed; but I fear not altered in my opinions. The few people I have been able to consult, I must say, express themselves equally strongly… I am no linguist, but I do know something about nomenclature, and have specially studied it, and I am actually very angry indeed.
J.R.R. Tolkien
Letter to his publisher, Rayner Unwin
3rd July 1956
—The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
Here is the original character breakdown for Mister Spock from the “writers’ bible” for Star Trek.
The Star trek guide. [Hollywood, Calif.? : Desilu Studios?], 1967.
Houghton Library, Harvard University
Book Corners maps book exchange locations internationally. It currently lists 37,229 community libraries and little free libraries, including 15,926 in France. The programmer is Andrea Grandi.
It’s going on five decades since I undertook a four month long rail trip around Europe. A large part of that journey was facilitated by an amazingly inexpensive and handy Eurail Pass. Recently, Eurail BV rebranded as Interrail BV to include the old Interrail Pass and launched a major ad campaign. Looking to become more than just a rail pass provider to its customers, Interrail aims to highlight the transformative experience of international train travel.
The result is The Interrail Effect, a fresh global brand platform that brings Interrail and Eurail (different brands for the same rail pass product) under one roof. At its heart is The Interrail Diaries, a creator-led campaign that spotlights 30 different creators who have been sharing their experiences of travelling across the world via train.
Featuring creators of all ages, backgrounds and travel styles, including solo travelers, groups and families, Interrail’s campaign compiles footage shot by each creator, showing the adventurous and often spontaneous nature of interrailing. Conversations with strangers, surprising friendships, missed connections, and beautiful scenery that you miss out on when travelling by plane, are all par for the course.
In much of the world, owning a lakeside home is desirable. But in the Dutch town of Loosdrecht, residents live within the lake itself, with houses on their own impossibly skinny islands. All I want is a little hut in the woods home on a strip of an island.
The Winners of the 2026 Pure Street Photography Awards Invoke Happenstance and Commotion. This year’s Pure Street Photography Award winners were chosen from close to 1,600 entries across 50 countries, with photos of everyday. A beam of sunlight that appears to be shooting straight out of a phone during a selfie, a rainy, moody street shot from ground level that makes every water splash look like its own tiny explosion.
The Film Experience is a free online course from MIT about movies & cinema. “This course concentrates on close analysis and criticism of a wide range of films, from the early silent period, classic Hollywood genres including musicals, thrillers…
What makes art famous and valuable? Who makes art famous and valuable? Those questions can feel impossible to answer. But in the case of Vincent (someone often referred to by only his first name more than 125 years after his death), we know the answer. It was Jo (pronounced “Yo” in Dutch), his 28-year-old sister-in-law, who inherited hundreds of his paintings that, at the time, had little market value. Jo is the reason that we see Vincent’s art absolutely everywhere today. We should all know her name.
As both an avid reader and a map librarian, I love a literary map, an image that can transport you into the world of the book. Literary maps record the location of places, whether real or imaginary, associated with authors and their works. Henry John Firley, a prolific literary map producer in the mid 20th century, stated,
“From the literary maps comes an extra stimulus which lends a sense of reality to the fictional portrayal of place and dimension, distance, and time. This seeming closeness to reality is felt by the reader as he visualizes a narrative with the aid of a map; for the reader the maps hold a power beyond mere abstract symbolism. The imaginative power of the author can better be illustrated if the flame of his experience is reflected by the background of graphic concepts.”
In 2019, the Library received a donation of 10 beautiful literary map paintings, commissioned by the Harris-Seybold Company for their “Maps of Books” promotional calendars. While the prints created of these works are found in libraries around the world, these original paintings have a unique vibrancy and vividness that cannot be translated to a print copy. …Maps
Buried somewhere in a drawer in my house there’s a t-shirt with the image of an Ampelmann. For some reason I picked it up at a flea market in Berlin’s Mauerpark for €3. I’m not sure why I was so taken with the image from the old East Berlin pedestrian traffic lights, it’s possible that I just had too many espressos that AM.
Anyway, my nostalgia for the Ampelmännchen was piqued by artist Maya Barkai’s assembled collection of pedestrian traffic signals from around the world: Walking Men Worldwide.
Some of the examples from unexpected cities have more personality, but I think the Tokyo and Andorra ones are my favorites aesthetically. Oddly, the iconic German Ampelmännchen isn’t among the crowd here.
A screenprint of the collected pedestrian people is available on the Walking Men.
I love a good library story and this one certainly delivers. Cutting through the white-capped waves of Japan’s Seto Inland Sea is a one-of-kind “floating library”. This is Hon no Mori-go (ほんのもり号) designed to provide children living on remote islands the opportunity to discover books and nurture their creativity.
Inside the ship are shelves lined with 2000 books including picture books, fairytales and illustrated guidebooks for young readers. The ship, which began operating last year, was designed and donated to Kagawa prefecture by renowned architect Tadao Ando, who previously designed another children’s library in Osaka and then donated it to the ward.
The ship carries children throughout the prefecture as part of school activities, and also operates family events during the summer holidays. Life jackets are mandatory before boarding and children receive special safety instructions.
In a letter to the children, Ando writes: “I hope they will travel around the world aboard a ship of hope, equipped with the knowledge and imagination to do so. I hope that, by reading many books aboard the Children’s Library: Hon no Mori-go, children will discover a special book of their own, cultivate the ‘strength to live,’ and joyfully spread their wings from the Seto Inland Sea toward the great ocean of the wider world.”
“I greet you from the other side of sorrow and despair, with a love so vast and shattered it will reach you everywhere.”
― Leonard Cohen
What is a saint? A saint is someone who has achieved a remote human possibility. It is impossible to say what that possibility is. I think it has something to do with the energy of love. Contact with this energy results in the exercise of a kind of balance in the chaos of existence. A saint does not dissolve the chaos; if he did the world would have changed long ago. I do not think that a saint dissolves the chaos even for himself, for there is something arrogant and warlike in the notion of a man setting the universe in order. It is a kind of balance that is his glory. He rides the drifts like an escaped ski. His course is a caress of the hill. His track is a drawing of the snow in a moment of its particular arrangement with wind and rock. Something in him so loves the world that he gives himself to the laws of gravity and chance. Far from flying with the angels, he traces with the fidelity of a seismograph needle the state of the solid bloody landscape.”
― Leonard Cohen, Beautiful Losers
