Award-winning photographer Kirill Neiezhmakov has created a brilliant hyperlapse tour of Vienna, Austria that plays on the popular longstanding joke that there are no kangaroos in Austria. The very entertaining timelapse video of Vienna explores many of the historic city’s most visited landmarks and attractions.
I have been hyping Vienna as a travel destination for decades, maybe this clever video will encourage tourists to give the city a try.
homepage link.
A 57 year old poet named Jiang Libo in China has spent $116,000 building a bookshop in a remote village on top of a mountain. The Milestone Bookstore is located in a rural area of Zhejiang province in eastern China, surrounded by farmland and woodland atop a mountain. The bookstore is built in the shape of the number seven and has a collection of 7,000 mostly literary books.
The self-published poet built the remote bookstore over the past three years to encourage literacy and to improve book access for young readers. “Before my bookshop was built, the closest bookshop or library to this village was in a town about 30km away,” Jiang said. “I found fewer and fewer people read books, and bookstores generally are struggling. However, I acted in contravention of this by opening a bookstore in a place with very few readers,” he said. “My thought is: when villagers are idle, or kids are on holiday, they can come to read books. Isn’t that wonderful?”
Last month, a small sailboat in distress was rescued by a massive 18th-century sailing ship. “This moment was very strange, and we wondered if we were dreaming. Where were we? What time period was it?”
“So however surreal those cities, the invisible ones that he builds, they have their counterpart in the real. They always have their counterpart in visible cities.” Darran Anderson on Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities.
CATS OF MANY LANDS by Louis Wain (New York/Paris/London: Raphael Tuck, 1914).
“To gain your own voice,
forget about having it heard.
Become a saint of
your own province
and your own consciousness.”
– Allen Ginsberg
You too can now take a virtual tour of the Pech Merle prehistoric cave paintings.
Here in the former Colonies we rarely pay any attention to the annual Eurovision music contest. However, this year the spirit of the iconic 19th century American author Edgar Allan Poe appears to be the inspiration for Austria’s entry in the 67th edition of the Eurovision Song Contest.
The Austrian duo Teya and Salena will be representing their nation in the second semi-final today with Who The Hell Is Edgar?, a song in which the writer plays a key role, as the lyrics to the first verse reveal:
There’s a ghost in my body and he is a lyricist.It is Edgar Allan Poe, and I think he can’t resist.Yeah, his brain is in my hand, and it’s moving really fast.Don’t know how he possessed me, but I’m happy that he did.
Teya explains: “We wanted to put our personal experiences as female songwriters into the song. It often feels like you have to prove yourself over and over again to be taken seriously. By presenting Edgar Allan Poe as the actual writer of the song, we want to draw attention to this frustrating part of the music business. It’s satire.”
Salena added: “This song is a snapshot of the fun we had on the day we wrote it. It started with wanting to convey what it feels like when a good song is made. Sometimes creativity rushes through you as if you‘re getting possessed by a ghost.”
I will be rootung for the duo and Edgar Allan Poe to win. Here’s a video of the stomping tune:
NB: If the video fails to open, please click here.
I have long been intrigued by old school pictoral maps. The exmples above and below are from the University of Michigan’s Clark Library Maps collection, each shows the United States through a different cultural lens, covering everything from literary giants and music to national parks and transportation. Some were created as part of marketing campaigns, while others are simply educational.
The map at the top was “published in the interest of a better understanding and appreciation of the life and works of Mark Twain by Warner Bros. Pictures, producers of ‘The Adventures of Mark Twain.’” Published in 1944, it delivers on its promise, providing a wealth of information with both captioned photographs and illustrations.
The primary purpose of this pictoral map was to promote Greyhound bus routes in 1934, the year it was published. The bus company still operates throughout the United States, but with a less comprehensive set of routes.
This map of National Parks of the United States and Southern Canada was created by Maurice Freed and published in the 1950s by the Curtis Publishing Company. The map itself is composed entirely of images with an index of numbered National Park names.
The Folklore Music Map of the United States above was created by Dorothea Dix Lawrence, who was a very successful opera singer turned folklorist, and includes illustrations with an index of descriptions. It was printed around 1950.
Published in 1957,this literary map is based on The United States in Literature, an America Reads anthology.
Here at Travel Between The Pages World HQ we are huge fans of public libraries. We were chuffed to learn about a new organization of library workers, library users, and community advocates that wants to help folks become more involved with community libraries. Libraries For the People aims to engage supporters by providing information about how to participate with their public library, advocate on its behalf, and help to ensure these public institutions remain viable amid ongoing interest in defunding and delegitimizing their value. What sets For the People apart is their commitment to local action. There is no overhead and no administration; the goal is to connect with and exchange ideas with other library advocates and get to work in your own backyard.
Umberto Eco: A Library of the World is a wonderful new documentary about the bestselling Italian author with perhaps the greatest intellectual appetite of any writer of his time. Directed by Davide Ferrario, the documentary will launch in the U.S. beginning June 30 at Film Forum in New York City, followed by showings across the country. Umberto Eco: A Library of the World, which takes viewers inside Eco’s extraordinary personal library, premiered at the Rome Film Festival last October. Have a look at the documentary in the trailer below.
nb: if the video fails to open, please click here.
And you wait. You wait for the one thing
that will change your life,
make it more than it is—
something wonderful, exceptional,
stones awakening, depths opening to you.
In the dusky bookstalls
old books glimmer gold and brown.
You think of lands you journeyed through,
of paintings and a dress once worn
by a woman you never found again.
And suddenly you know: that was enough.
You rise and there appears before you
in all its longings and hesitations
the shape of what you lived.
— Rainer Maria Rilke, “Remembering,”
An Ocean of Books is an interactive map of over 100,000 authors and 145,162 books. On this map every island is an author and every city is a book. Searching the Ocean of Books map by author allows the user to discover nearby writers in close proximity.
Each writer’s island is based on the amount that has been written about them on the web. The more frequently they are mentioned on the internet the bigger their island on the map. The position of the islands and the proximity of authors to each other is determined by the number of connections between them on the internet. If two authors are mentioned in lots of the same articles on the web then the closer they will be on An Ocean of Books.
The connections between authors and therefore their proximity on the map is determined by a machine learning algorithm. If you select an author’s name on the map then you can read a short biography. If you zoom in on an author’s island then all the writer’s books will appear as cities on the map. Click on a book’s title and you can read a short introduction to the selected book.
Travel Between The Pages 