Canada and France share a maritime border, despite the ejection of France from North America in the Seven Years’ War. Article 6 of the 1763 Treaty of Paris allowed France to retain the tiny islands of St. Pierre and Miquelon in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to facilitate French fishing in the region. France retained control over them despite losing the Napoleonic Wars to Britain and her allies.
During the Twentieth Century, the great powers gained increasing interest in directly controlling the seas from which they were able to extract wealth in the form of oil. So the precise border between these French islands and the now independent Canada was not a matter to ignore.
The two nations concluded arbitration in 1972, leading to the sea borders illustrated above. The map is provided by Sovereign Limits, a website about maritime boundaries. France maintains a sizeable Exclusive Economic Zone dangling inside otherwise Canadian waters.
via Amazing Maps
The late Robert Coover in answer to the question:”Why do you write ?”
Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.
Because art’s life is preferable, in truth, to life’s beautiful terror.
Because, as time does not pass (nothing, as Beckett tells us, passes), it passes the time.
Because death, our mythless master, is somehow amused by epitaphs.
Because epitaphs, well-struck, give death, our voracious master, heartburn.
Because fiction imitates life’s beauty, thereby inventing the beauty life lacks.
Because fiction is the best position, at once exotic and familiar, for fucking the world.
Because fiction, mediating paradox, celebrates it.
Because fiction, mothered by love, loves love as a mother might her unloving child.
Because fiction speaks, hopelessly, beautifully, as the world speaks.
Because God, created in the storyteller’s image, can be destroyed only by His maker.
Because, in its perversity, art harmonizes the disharmonious.
Because, in its profanity, fiction sanctifies life.
Because, in its terrible isolation, writing is a path to brotherhood.
Because in the beginning was the gesture, and in the end to come as well: in between what we have are words.
Because, of all the arts, only fiction can unmake the myths that unman men.
Because of its endearing futility, its outrageous pretensions.
Because the pen, though short, casts a long shadow (upon, it must be said, no surface).
Because the world is re-invented every day and this is how it is done.
Because there is nothing new under the sun except its expression.
Because truth, that elusive joker, hides himself in fictions and must therefore be sought there.
Because writing, in all space’s unimaginable vastness, is still the greatest adventure of all.
And because, alas, what else?
From Delta #28, June 1989; republished in Conjunctions.
I recently stumbled upon the charming animated video below. It should appeal to all of you bibliophiles and bookstore denizens. The film was produced in 2015 by its Norwegian creator after a very successful crowdfunding campaign.
It was adapted from a story by the late Paul Auster, IT WAS MINE (2015). A man is searching in many bookstores and libraries for a rare and remarkable book until, in a random coincidence, he runs into a woman who just finished reading it. It is a short Norwegian film, done in the most original animated style.
A papyrus of part of the Iliad has been discovered in a Roman-era tomb of mummies in Egypt. “The papyrus contains a passage from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, specifically the section known as the ‘Catalogue of Ships’…” from the Greco-Roman era.
I am embarrassed to admit that I know next to nothing about ornithology. Don’t get me wrong, I love birds, in fact this time of the year I get a little obsessed about identifying the birds reappearing in my yard after returning from wherever they disappear to during the winter. Everyone in our household uses a terrific app called Merlin from Cornell University, but it’s not enough.
Data visualization artist Nadieh Bremer created Searching For Birds, a website which turns Google Trends data into a wonderfully scrollable exploration of which birds Americans search for — and why the rarest ones barely register at all.
Wrote Bremer, “As you scroll through through the following interactive graphics, you’ll get a glimpse at roughly 700 North American and Hawaiian species and learn about why some of them make us fall in love.”
Fair warning: there goes the day.
I was always intrigued by the Dell Mapbacks books. They used a clever eye-catching gimmick by adding a map for each title regardless of whether the contents warranted such a thing. Dell began life as a publisher of mysteries, hence the logo of an eye peeping through a keyhole. Maps are more justifiable if applied to a detective story, where a map may help the reader picture the layout of a location or trace the movements of a character. But once Dell branched out into other areas of fiction the maps seemed increasingly superfluous, especially those that limit themselves to the plan of an office or apartment. For some there’s also the question of accuracy. The novelization of Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope shows a map of the apartment that doesn’t correspond to the layout of the rooms as they’re seen on the screen, something that readers who’d seen the film would have been quick to recognize.
The always interesting website CrimeReads has a great article on these unusual paperbacks right here. Check it out.
John Venn is noted for introducing Venn diagrams, which are used in logic, set theory, probability, statistics, and computer science. In 1866, Venn published The Logic of Chance, a groundbreaking book which espoused the frequency theory of probability, arguing that probability should be determined by how often something is forecast to occur as opposed to “educated” assumptions. Venn then further developed George Boole‘s theories in the 1881 work Symbolic Logic, where he highlighted what would become known as Venn diagrams.
“Cultural depictions of the 1960s seemed to split by the end of the 1980s, with some still buying into the groovy colour defined by everything from flower power to Granny Takes a Trip. The other half, in stark contrast, focused on a faded, bricks-and-mortar version (I think the truth of the decade is likely housed somewhere between the two), and there are few better examples of this than Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I (1987).” An enquiry into Richard E Grant’s coat in the film Withnail and I.
TasteBuds NYC is a wonderful online series about a guy and his bestie who have made it their mission to eat every type of food in the world without ever leaving New York City. They first choose a single cuisine by spinning a wheel, then head out to a restaurant that serves it. The only requirement is that the restaurant is located within one of the five boroughs.
At each restaurant, they explain their project and get the VIP treatment. They ask questions about the cuisine while they eat their way through several dishes and quite a few drinks. It would take a week to recover from such excess. Now I’m craving Indonesian food. You can see videos from all 21 restaurants so far at YouTube.
The Bodega Cats of New York project documents the working cats of NYC’s delis, bodegas, and corner stores.
The cat at the local deli wasn’t a pet. She knew the regulars. She kept the mice out. She gave people a reason to walk an extra block. And she was technically a violation of city health code.
That was six years ago. Since then, the project has documented over 150 shops, collected 13,500 petition signatures, and helped introduce the first legislation in New York City history to classify bodega cats as working animals.
Bodega Cats of New York is also a new book about the hardest working cats in New York City. You might like to view this related video from 2011.
In the late 15th and mid-16th centuries, publishers in Venice produced a genre of small books called isolarii . The original publications can be thought of as an encyclopedia of islands containing maps along with text descriptions of significant history, maritime information, mythology, and an analysis of the physical geography. Although primarily intended for sailors, isolarii were read by many audiences, including those reading for simple pleasure.
In 2020, Sebastian Clark launched an imprint called isolarii that features pocket-size books intended for the travels of the reader rather than the mariner.
“Month to month, they map the extremes of human knowledge and creative endeavor, assembling the perennial legends and emerging icons—scientists and novelists, philosophers and activists, architects and technologists, from the counterculture to the avant-garde—pioneering new ways of understanding ourselves and the Earth.”
As the publisher details, “The humanism of the past 500 years is dead. Believing man was exceptional, it opened the abyss of extinction. A new approach requires the effort of all those who tear down convention in order to preserve what is meaningful—not just environments, but irrationality, autonomy and joy.”
isolarri has created a quirky way to produce printed books with minimal material waste. The books literally pocket-sized volumes—the size of a pack of cigarettes— that will fit in the palm of your hand and come with removable jackets.
“We really wanted to screw with scale”, says Sebastian Clark, the co-founder of publishing imprint ISOLARII, which sends out its iPhone-sized books roughly every two months to a global subscriber base. “And to make them as easy to get as possible.”
When Sebastian Clark founded Isolarii in September 2020, he had no publishing experience. Six years later, the publisher has 3,000 subscribers in 50 countries, a catalog of nearly 20 titles, and is now making its move into the traditional trade with a new line of full-sized paperbacks—dubbed Isobacks—and a co-publication deal in the works with Penguin Press.
The US National Park Finder filters all 63 U.S. national parks by their best months to visit, as well as listing their top activities and best spots for stargazing. After filtering, each park card gives you sample itineraries, fun facts, travel hacks, and resources and advice pulled from Reddit. The next park on my travel wishlist is Zion National Park, and it’s helpful to get all this information on one page.
A new paper released last week by the Pew Research Center found that print books continue to be American adults’ preferred reading format, though digital formats continue to make inroads.
According to a survey of 8,046 U.S. adults conducted last year from October 6–16, 64% of respondents said they had read at least part of a print book in the last 12 months, down from 72% in 2011. During the same time span, the percentage of respondents who read an e-book rose to 31% from 17%, while audiobook usage jumped to 26% from 11%.
The number of e-book readers has seen only a small increase since 2014, when the percentage of adults reading e-books rose to 28%. Audiobook readership, however, has had stronger gains since 2014, when 14% of readers preferred an audiobook. Adults favoring print books was at 69% in 2014.
Among the survey’s other highlights were the findings that college graduates were more likely than non-college grads to have read a book in the past year; Americans under 50 were more likely than older adults to read e-books and audiobooks; white Americans were most likely to read print books, whereas Asian Americans stand out in their use of e-books; and women were more likely than men to say they have read a book in the past 12 months.
via Publishers Weekly
Travel Between The Pages 