Only wait a while and listen.

Posted on March 9, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

I recently had a sad conversation with my sister about someone who we both loved who took his own life many years ago. It reminded me of this moving poem by Pulitzer-winning poet Galway Kinnell  addressed to a student of his who was contemplating suicide. Originally published in Kinnell’s 1980 collection Mortal Acts, Mortal Words, it was later included in A New Selected Poems. 

WAIT

Wait, for now.
Distrust everything, if you have to.
But trust the hours. Haven’t they
carried you everywhere, up to now?
Personal events will become interesting again.
Hair will become interesting.
Pain will become interesting.
Buds that open out of season will become lovely again.
Second-hand gloves will become lovely again,
their memories are what give them
the need for other hands. And the desolation
of lovers is the same: that enormous emptiness
carved out of such tiny beings as we are
asks to be filled; the need
for the new love is faithfulness to the old.

Wait.
Don’t go too early.
You’re tired. But everyone’s tired.
But no one is tired enough.
Only wait a while and listen.
Music of hair,
Music of pain,
music of looms weaving all our loves again.
Be there to hear it, it will be the only time,
most of all to hear,
the flute of your whole existence,
rehearsed by the sorrows, play itself into total exhaustion.

 

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Into the Rabbit Hole

Posted on March 8, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Urban Artist Julien Malland became Seth Globepainter in the 90s when he began to paint in the streets of Paris. Looking to open doors to people’s unconsciousness, their youth and their dreams, Malland’s works feature a reoccurring theme of childhood. Seth travels the world, collaborating with local artists to highlight their traditional practices and exchange ideas. Drawing inspiration from his surroundings, he incorporates cultural elements into his art and turns the children into messengers of his investigations. Malland says he puts his characters into difficult social, political or geographical contexts to raise awareness on said issues around the world. ‘Rabbit Hole’ is located in Le Mans, France. It took Seth and 5 assistants 3 weeks to realize this beautiful, anamorphic artwork.

NB: If the video above fails to launch, please click HERE.

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oh, the streets of Rome are filled with rubble

Posted on March 7, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

These postcards of the ancient landmarks of Rome were created using the Photochrom process, which adds precise gradations of artificial color to black and white photos. Invented by Swiss printer Orell Gessner Fussli, the process involved creating lithographic stone from the negatives—Up to 15 different tinted stones could be involved in the production of a single picture, but the result was remarkably lifelike color at a time when true color photography was still in its infancy.

The Library of Congress hosts forty eight of these images in their online catalog, all downloadable as high quality jpegs or tiffs. In most of these images—with their otherworldly coloration—we can imagine Rome the way it looked not only in 1890, but also how it might have looked in the 17th and 18th centuries—and to passionate Romantic poets in the early 19th, a place of raw natural grandeur and sublime man-made decay. See the Library of Congress online catalog to view and download all forty-eight of these postcards.

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Story Time

Posted on March 6, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Come Together: 3,000 Years of Stories and Storytelling is running at The Morgan Library & Museum focusing on the rich history of storytelling through 140 literary works and other objects from its own collection alongside loans.

On view through May 3, it highlights a variety of narratives from the Babylonian, which is among the earliest literary works preserved in written form, to works by writers and artists inspired by New York City, featuring printed books, manuscripts, films, artifacts, comics, drawings, paintings, and photographs.

Highlights include:

  • a tablet Inscribed in Akkadian with a fragment of the Babylonian flood story from the Epic of Atrahasis, Mesopotamia, dating from the First Dynasty of Babylon and the reign of King Ammi-saduqa (ca. 1646–26 BC)
  • a heavily annotated page of James Joyce’s Ulysses
  • Jean de Brunhoff’s earliest drawings of Babar
  • a woodcut-illustrated edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, printed around 1483 by William Caxton
  • Maurice Sendak’s 1979 storyboard for Where the Wild Things Are opera in watercolor, pen and ink, and graphite pencil
  • Henry David Thoreau’s journals and Édouard Manet’s only surviving notebook

 

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And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.

Posted on March 5, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

BE ANGRY AT THE SUN

Robinson Jeffers

That public men publish falsehoods
Is nothing new. That America must accept
Like the historical republics corruption and empire
Has been known for years.

Be angry at the sun for setting
If these things anger you. Watch the wheel slope and turn,
They are all bound on the wheel, these people, those warriors.
This republic, Europe, Asia.

Observe them gesticulating,
Observe them going down. The gang serves lies, the passionate
Man plays his part; the cold passion for truth
Hunts in no pack.

You are not Catullus, you know,
To lampoon these crude sketches of Caesar. You are far
From Dante’s feet, but even farther from his dirty
Political hatreds.

 

Let boys want pleasure, and men
Struggle for power, and women perhaps for fame,
And the servile to serve a Leader and the dupes to be duped.
Yours is not theirs.

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He who forgives easily invites offense.

Posted on March 4, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Continue reading →

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Write like an Egyptian

Posted on March 3, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

“It feels really amazing that the techniques that I use to carve stone are just the same that have been used for thousands of years,” sculptor and stone carver Miriam Johnson shares in this video for the Victoria and Albert Museum.

While Johnson traces a simple cartouche, an oval frame, for the pharaoh Khufu, she describes some of what she’s doing, but much of the video is intentionally quiet.

With mallets and chisels, she demonstrates two methods of carving hieroglyphs in stone: sunken relief carving, where characters are defined by crisp, V-shaped grooves cut deep into the surface, and raised relief, where the surrounding background is chipped away.

“So one of the benefits of carving sunken relief is that you see more of the shadows… One of the benefits of carving raised relief is that you’ve got more opportunity of putting more texture into the characters.”

 

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Slava Ukraini

Posted on March 2, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Every year on the anniversary of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, artist Teun Castelein charters barrel organs to play the Ukrainian national anthem all day long directly in front of the Russian embassy in The Hague. Each year he adds one more organ. This year there were four and they all played out of tune to maximize the annoyance factor.

 

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Five Centuries of Vulgarity

Posted on March 1, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Green’s Dictionary of Slang has become available as a free website, giving you access to an even more updated version of the dictionary. Collectively, the website lets you trace the development of slang over the past 500 years. The website allows lookups of word definitions and etymologies for free, and, for a well-worth-it subscription fee, it offers citations and more extensive search options.” If you’ve ever wondered about the meaning of words like argle-bargle, brickhouse, floozy, kidlywink, gollier, and linthead, you now know where to begin.

“The three volumes of Green’s Dictionary of Slang demonstrate the sheer scope of a lifetime of research by Jonathon Green, the leading slang lexicographer of our time. A remarkable collection of this often reviled but endlessly fascinating area of the English language, it covers slang from the past five centuries right up to the present day, from all the different English-speaking countries and regions. Totaling 10.3 million words and over 53,000 entries, the collection provides the definitions of 100,000 words and over 413,000 citations. Every word and phrase is authenticated by genuine and fully-referenced citations of its use, giving the work a level of authority and scholarship unmatched by any other publication in this field.”

 

 

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The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator

Posted on February 28, 2026 by Brian D. Butler

Jonathan Franzen’s “10 rules for novelists”:

  1. The reader is a friend, not an adversary, not a spectator.
  2. Fiction that isn’t an author’s personal adventure into the frightening or the unknown isn’t worth writing for anything but money.
  3. Never use the word then as a conjunction — we have and for this purpose. Substituting then is the lazy or tone-deaf writer’s non-solution to the problem of too many ands on the page.
  4. Write in third person unless a really distinctive first-person voice offers itself irresistibly.
  5. When information becomes free and universally accessible, voluminous research for a novel is devalued along with it.
  6. The most purely autobiographical fiction requires pure invention. Nobody ever wrote a more autobiographical story than The Metamorphosis.
  7. You see more sitting still than chasing after.
  8. It’s doubtful that anyone with an Internet connection at his workplace is writing good fiction.
  9. Interesting verbs are seldom very interesting.
  10. You have to love before you can be relentless.

(From The End of the End of the Earth: Essays, 2018.)

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