Category Archives: Uncategorized

An Honor Without Irony

Posted on June 24, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Last week, an outdoor sculpture honoring the iconic American author J.D. Salinger was dedicated on a hillside near his family’s ancestral home in Lithuania. The artwork celebrates the writer’s most acclaimed novel The Catcher in the Rye. Ironically, Salinger’s 1951 bildungsroman … Continue reading →

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Just One of the Reasons We Love Iceland

Posted on June 13, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

According to the 2020 Global Peace Index, Iceland is the most peaceful nation on the planet. Since 2008, the Institute for Economics and Peace has ranked Iceland first. This year, it is followed by New Zealand,  Austria, Portugal and Denmark on the … Continue reading →

Posted in Europe, Freedom of Speech, Tourism, Uncategorized, USA | Tagged , , , , | 3 Comments

When Matter Meets Anti-Matter

Posted on May 29, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Poem with No Children In It Claire Wahmanholm Instead, the poem is full of competent trees, sturdy and slow-growing. The trees live on a wide clean lawn full of adults. All night, the adults grow older without somersaulting or spinning. … Continue reading →

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Excursions into humor + despair

Posted on May 24, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

The Detroit-based publisher Rotland Press advertises itself as “a fine publisher of excursions into humor + despair.” It is also the perfect vehicle for a literary and arts journal to help us cope with the overwhelming nature of the Covid-19 … Continue reading →

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Read Your Way Across The U.S.

Posted on April 18, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

According to Good Reads this map offers the most popular book in each U.S. state.

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Mondays are miscellaneous now

Posted on March 23, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Antiquarian books – from the bookshelf’s view point.. This book records a Buddhist text given to the Qianlong emperor by a Panchen Lama from Tibet. The calligraphy was written by the court official Liang Guozhi (1723–1774) then engraved into the jade pages and painted … Continue reading →

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Bookstore Tourism : Greenwich Village NYC

Posted on November 2, 2019 by Brian D. Butler

In this era of vanishing neighborhood bookshops, Three Lives and Company in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood is rare survivor. For four decades, this West Village indie has been quietly offering an exceptionally well-curated selection of literary fiction, narrative … Continue reading →

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And there it goes

Posted on October 31, 2019 by Brian D. Butler

 

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American Voyageur

Posted on October 11, 2019 by Brian D. Butler

Few American writers have achieved the cultural impact of Herman Melville, author of the eternal classic Moby-Dick, yet he died unrecognized by his contemporaries for his genius. To commemorate the 200th anniversary of Melville’s birth, Philadelphia’s Rosenbach Museum and Library has … Continue reading →

Posted in Art, Books, History, Libraries, Museums, Tourism, Uncategorized, USA, Writing | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment

Science Fiction Inspires Science IRL

Posted on September 18, 2019 by Brian D. Butler

News of scientist Giovanni Aldini’s electric reanimation experiments on corpses in 1803 reached author Mary Shelley before the publication of her  iconic science fiction book Frankenstein. It was an instance of science informing fiction. In turn, Shelley’s masterpiece would eventually … Continue reading →

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