You may want to see this (or not)

The Abandoned/Ghost station project captures those mysterious stations throughout London which are long closed and disused. Many remain fairly intact and some even feature time capsule-like qualities, such as WWII propaganda posters hanging from the platform walls.

The Museum of Portable Sound (est. London, UK, November 2015 by Dr John Kannenberg) is a portable museum dedicated to the culture and history of sound. Its headquarters is now located in Southsea, Portsmouth, and operates throughout the southern UK and anywhere its Director travels.

Since May of 2020, the museum has conducted online visits via video chat, and has now been visited by people all across Europe, North America, South America, Australia, India, Japan, and China.

“Anyone whose goal is ‘something higher’ must expect someday to suffer vertigo. What is vertigo? Fear of falling? No, Vertigo is something other than fear of falling. It is the voice of the emptiness below us which tempts and lures us, it is the desire to fall, against which, terrified, we defend ourselves.”

— Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

I recently stumbled upon a story about the creation of a gorgeous version of THE HOBBIT by J.R.R. Tolkien with an art binding by Dmitri Koutsipetsidis in collaboration with Mia Heath. Check out the story of the book and Dmitri’s path to becoming a skilled bookbinder in Athens.

from Whiskers & Rhymes by Arnold Lobel (1985)

During the Fascist regime, the power of media was already well-known. To bring the propaganda all over Italy, a series of trucks were set up with a projector system and a structure to fix a screen right in front of the vehicle. A simple and practical way to have a moving cinema — called “cinemobile” — able to travel to around small towns and villages.

This unit, one of the very few existing, was built on an old Fiat 521 chassis by Carrozzeria Fissore, and was even brought to Eritrea, in the Italian colonies of that time, were it was found many years later. Its original movie projector is still in place and still works after a careful restoration.

A CANTICLE FOR LEIBOWITZ by Walter M. Miller. (New York: Lippincot, 1959) Cover art by M. Glasser. First edition was issued with a paper banner from publisher.

A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man’s scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.

The novel is an amalgamation of three short stories Miller had originally published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction [April 1955-February 1957], inspired by the author’s participation in the bombing of a monastery at the Battle of Monte Cassino during World War II. The book is considered one of the classics of science fiction and has never been out of print. Appealing to mainstream and genre critics and readers alike, it won the 1961 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel, and often appears on “best of” lists. It has been recognized three times with Locus Poll Awards for best all-time science fiction novel. Its themes of religion, recurrence, and church versus state have generated a significant body of scholarly research.’

 

 

 

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3 Responses to You may want to see this (or not)

  1. Shaharee says:

    A canticle of Leibowitz is a book that I have to read. Although it’s kind of weird to imagine a monastery order whose rule is based upon the believes of an orthodox jew.

  2. I’ve read before that “A Canticle for Leibowitz” is a powerful story. One of these days, I’d like to get around to reading it 🙂

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