Bookstore Tourism: Seoul

MoMA in New York City has opened a bookstore in Seoul, South Korea residents and visitors in the Korean city will find the new space in the Dosan Park area of Gangnam, the fast-growing and now-iconic neighborhood south of the Han River.

MoMA opened the bookshop with Hyundai Card, the credit card company under Seoul’s Hyundai Motor Group that has partnered with the museum for nearly 20 years. Inside, the layout unfolds as a series of distinct zones. The main book hall is finished in pale grey with polished concrete floors and floating metal shelves. This way, the colorful covers of MoMA publications become the focal point. The design store in the next room brings a bold shift in atmosphere, where walls and floors rendered in glossy yellow and orange create an immersive glow around the curated objects and apparel.

 

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Never has our future been more unpredictable

Never has our future been more unpredictable, never have we depended so much on political forces that cannot be trusted to follow the rules of common sense and self-interest—forces that look like sheer insanity, if judged by the standards of other centuries. It is as though mankind had divided itself between those who believe in human omnipotence (who think that everything is possible if one knows how to organize masses for it) and those for whom powerlessness has become the major experience of their lives. On the level of historical insight and political thought there prevails an ill-defined, general agreement that the essential structure of all civilizations is at the breaking point. Although it may seem better preserved in some parts of the world than in others, it can nowhere provide the guidance to the possibilities of the century, or an adequate response to its horrors. Desperate hope and desperate fear often seem closer to the center of such events than balanced judgment and measured insight. The central events of our time are not less effectively forgotten by those committed to a belief in an unavoidable doom, than by those who have given themselves up to reckless optimism.

 

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“The world is not in your books and maps. It’s out there.”

George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. of London published the first edition of J. R. R. Tolkien’s novel The Hobbit on this date in 1937. It was illustrated with many black-and-white drawings by Tolkien himself. The original printing was only a 1,500 run and sold out by December due to enthusiastic reviews.

 

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Caturday

 

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Travelers still need (and love) maps

It’s been years since I visited the tiny state of Rhode Island, but the next time that I go I will definitely make time for the Map Center. Cartographer Andrew Middleton took over the 70 year old shop two years ago and has reimagined the place. Just like bibliophiles, map fanatics are passionate about their stores. The video below is a love letter to the Map Center. The video came about, Andrew says, when a customer came back and insisted on filming it. (“Is this the highest form of flattery? Most people just leave a review!”) What I appreciate most about it is being able to see what’s on his shelves and walls, especially since I can’t visit it in person right now.

 

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Top Secret

The 1984 action comedy Top Secret! contains an odd sequence set in a Swedish bookstore. Val Kilmer, Lucy Gutteridge, and Peter Cushing acted the entire scene backward, and the filmmakers then reversed this performance to produce a dreamlike atmosphere in which impossible things happen. The scene required 17 takes and four dogs.

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Fill your life with metaphors. And then explode.

Ray Bradbury // “Fall in love and stay in love. Explode. Don’t intellectualize. Get passionate about ideas. Cram your head full of images… Stay off the internet and all that crap. Read all the great books. Read all the great poetry. See all the great films. Fill your life with metaphors. And then explode.”

“Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom: poets, visionaries — realists of a larger reality.”

–Ursula K. Le Guin

“I only wanted to tell you that this was the wonderful time for you. Don’t let any of it go by without enjoying it. There won’t be any more merry-go-rounds. No more cotton candy. No more band concerts. I only wanted to tell you, Martin, that this is the wonderful time. Now! Here! That’s all. That’s all I wanted to tell you.”

― Rod Serling

Henry Miller // “I believe that today more than ever a book should be sought after even if it has only one great page in it. We must search for fragments, splinters, toenails, anything that has ore in it, anything that is capable of resuscitating the body and the soul.”

Jorge Luis Borges // “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”

Sylvia Plath // “What I fear most, I think, is the death of the imagination. When the sky outside is merely pink, and the rooftops merely black: that photographic mind which paradoxically tells the truth, but the worthless truth, about the world. It is that synthesizing spirit, that ‘shaping’ force, which prolifically sprouts and makes up its own worlds with more inventiveness than God which I desire… We must be moving, working, making dreams to run toward.”

Albert Camus // “The only way to deal with an unfree world is to become so absolutely free that your very existence is an act of rebellion.”

 

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Most Boring Book in the World

I’ve read some horribly tedious books, but apparently they do not come close to this one. In 1978, Clive James reviewed the official biography of Leonid Ilyich Brezhnev (General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1964 to 1982) by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, CPSU Central Committee. “I read the whole thing from start to finish, waiting for the inevitable slip-up which would result in a living sentence. It never happened.”

James found it so dull that “If you were to recite even a single page in the open air, birds would fall out of the sky and dogs drop dead.”

Here’s an excerpt from the biography:

The plenum once again proved convincingly the CPSU’s monolithic unity, its stand on Leninist principles, and its political maturity. It demonstrated the fidelity of the Party and its Central Committee to Marxism-Leninism and expressed the unswerving determination of Communists to adhere to and develop steadfastly the Leninist standards of Party life and the principles of Party leadership, notably that of collective leadership, and boldly and resolutely to set aside every impediment to the creative work of Party and people.

Still want more

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Making me nostalgic for Autumn in Switzerland

Regular visitors to TBTP know that I am a sucker for well produced tourist bureau travel ads. This one is a bit cringy, but hit home for me. Way back in the 20th century I spent most of a glorious Autumn in Switzerland and still wax nostalgic about that trip whenever I get the chance.

“It all seemed perfect, maybe too perfect? Hollywood icon Halle Berry, tennis star Roger Federer and Swiss director Marc Forster set out to capture the beauty of Swiss autumn. But the shoot in the breathtaking landscape turned out trickier than expected – thanks to one particular Oscar-winning actress… Take a look behind the scenes of an unfinished film that made everyone love autumn in Switzerland a little longer.”

Switzerland. https://Switzerland.com/autumn

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Navigating a city without an address

I have been in some places that have confusing address systems, but nothing as baffling as Costa Rica. Direcciones is a short documentary about how giving directions works in Costa Rica, where “a centralized system for street addresses does not exist”. Instead, people use landmarks as reference points when giving directions. Here’s a postal worker talking about how some senders use outdated location markers to send letters:

Pretty bad, addresses here are pretty bad. For example, there is a letter I get, like, once a month. It says, “From the old Cristal Hotel…” and then some other reference points. So, yeah, it’s hard because people don’t update the addresses, they just write “from the old…” and it stays “from the old…” The Cristal Hotel had already closed when I was born.

NB: If the video link fails to open in your browser, please click here for our home page.

 

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