Forty years after Banned Books Week was launched in 1982 to raise awareness about censorship, the issue has taken on new importance across the country. This year more than ever it’s essential that we raise awareness about book banning and censorship. Books unite us. Books encourage boundless exploration and allow readers to spread their wings. Stories give flight to new ideas and perspectives. Reading—especially books that set us free—expands our worldview. Censorship, on the other hand, locks away our freedom and divides us from humanity in our own cages.
The United States in in the midst of a culture war driven by neo-Fascists and white Christian Nationists. Funded by a network of dark money from extremist oligarchs, sham community and parent groups are attacking libraries and school boards on a daily basis in nefarious attemps to ban and censor books.
TheHope Signs initiative was created by Gothenburg Book Fair and advertising agency Nord DDB, and sees authors such as Jojo Moyes, David Lagercrantz, Lauren Groff, and Anthony Doerr sharing their thoughts on global warming for climate crisis demonstration placards.
Printed on the posters are one-liners such as “It ruined first all the other life on the planet, then in a blink it killed itself,” by Lauren Groff, and “It is through hope that we create the world not yet visible but possible,” by Vanessa Nakate.
The posters are free to download and use the for rallies and for various social causes by printing them from the Hope Signs website. To further spread the message, they can also be posted on social media.
Johana Burai, a Swedish graphic designer, helped illustrate the posters to make them look like heat maps to further instill the image of climate change in onlookers’ minds.
The Santa Fe, New Mexico-based cutting edge arts group known as Meow Wolf has launched an exciting project in Denver, Colorado called the Covergence Station. Squeezed into a pizza slice-shaped space between urban highways, the colorful attraction is a series of immersive installations made from mostly salvaged materials. Meow Wolf has collaborated with 300 regional artists and creatives to build the innovative attraction.
According to creative director Chadney Everett, “We have a mission to make art that is as accessible to a billionaire as a minimum wage worker and create experiences that are accessible to them—not only financially but spiritually accessible.”
The venue has a lobby, events space and four primary gallery spaces that take advantage of the five-storey structure with wall-to-wall decoration and design. A series of smaller galleries line the space as well.
Van Gogh writing his brother for paints
Hemingway testing his shotgun
Celine going broke as a doctor of medicine
the impossibility of being human
Villon expelled from Paris for being a thief
Faulkner drunk in the gutters of his town
the impossibility of being human
Burroughs killing his wife with a gun
Mailer stabbing his
the impossibility of being human
Maupassant going mad in a rowboat
Dostoyevsky lined up against a wall to be shot
Crane off the back of a boat into the propeller
the impossibility
Sylvia with her head in the oven like a baked potato
Harry Crosby leaping into that Black Sun
Lorca murdered in the road by Spanish troops
the impossibility
Artaud sitting on a madhouse bench
Chatterton drinking rat poison
Shakespeare a plagiarist
Beethoven with a horn stuck into his head against deafness
the impossibility the impossibility
Nietzsche gone totally mad
the impossibility of being human
all too human
this breathing
in and out
out and in
these punks
these cowards
these champions
these mad dogs of glory
moving this little bit of light toward us
impossibly.
When she was nine years old, Octavia Butler saw a sci-fi film called “Devil Girl From Mars” and thought to herself: “I can write a better story than that.” She went on to become the first widely recognized Black female science fiction writer, publishing 12 novels in all. She was the only sci-fi writer ever to be awarded a MacArthur “Genius” Grant, which she added to her Nebula Award, Hugo Award, and PEN Lifetime Achievement Award. She used fiction to tell stories of deep truth, imparting wisdom that transcends genre, gender, or race. Even as the times have changed, her stories continue to entertain and enlighten.
I haven’t paid much attention to the deluge of content that has been generated lately by AI machines, but something about the Summer Island project captured my attention. Summer Island is a comic, with all the artwork generated by Midjourney AI. To my untrained eye it looks like it was created by professional human illustrators. The fantasy/horror comic is a Free Download and well worth a look. It’s the brainchild of writer Steve Coulson who shared about his process and motivation (below). Even if the genre is outside of your wheelhouse, I encourage you to check out the work.
“I’ve loved comics – and been an avidreader – since I was five. Now I’m 57. So it’s taken me half a century to get around to creating my own comic story. And they say you can’t teach an olddog new tricks! The problem has always been – I can’tdraw, which is a bit of setback in a visual medium. And I had no friendly artistic collaborator who trusted me enough to take on a project like this (wisely).But now there’s MidJourney, one of the new crop of Artificial Intelligence image generators. All the illustrations in this story were created by MidJourney,based on written prompts I supplied, and while I’ve tweaked a few things here and there in Photoshop, what you see here is basically what you get (if you ask it nicely.) The story itself started life as a photographic exploration, using Midjourney to create an essay in the style of the 1973 movie, The WickerMan (which you can also see in the following pages).After I’d finished the essay, I wondered- could I use MidJourney to tell thes ame story in a completely different visual and narrative style? SUMMER ISLAND is the result. Do I think MidJourney will replace the comic artists I grew to love over the years? No, of course not. Those geniuses have an eye for dramatic composition and dynamic narrative that I strongly doubt machine learning will ever be able to match. But as a visualization tool for non-artists like myself, it’s a hell of a lot of fun. And when MidJourney spit outsome of these panels, I found myself doing a double-take at the quality it could already produce. And as a goodfriend of mine used to say “And Steve- this is the WORST it will ever be!” I hope you enjoyed your visit to SUMMER ISLAND.It’s just one small corner of a world grappling with a monster problem. So perhaps we’ll return one day. Meanwhile, I’d love to hear what you think. – SC Email:scoulson@campfirenyc.com”
The news that a streaming TV network has announced the upcoming release of a series based on a novel rarely rouses much interest here at Travel Between The Pages World HQ, however the drop of a teaser-trailer for The Peripheral, the sci-fi series adapted from William Gibson’s 2014 sci-fi mystery thriller of the same name grabbed our attention. If you haven’t read the novel yet, I highly recommend it.
The Peripheral centers on Flynne Fisher, a woman trying to hold together the pieces of her broken, dysfunctional family in what we affectionately call a shithole region of the United States. Flynne is intelligent, ambitious, and on a collision course with the future.. The Peripheral is master storyteller William Gibson’s dazzling, hallucinatory glimpse into the fate of humanity — and what lies beyond.
Flynne Fisher lives in a near future rural American South, working at the local 3D printing shop, while earning much needed extra money playing VR games for rich people. One night she dons a headset and finds herself in futuristic London—a sleek and mysterious world, alluringly different from her own hardscrabble existence.
But this isn’t like any game she’s ever played before: Flynne begins to realize it isn’t virtual reality… it’s real. Someone in London, seventy years in the future, has found a way to open a door to Flynne’s world. And as utterly beguiling as London is… it’s also dangerous. As Flynne searches to discover who has connected their worlds, and for what purpose, her presence here sets dangerous forces into motion…forces intent on destroying Flynne and her family in her own world.
The series stars Chloë Grace Moretz as Flynne Fisher. The first 8-episode season will premier on Amazon Prime on Oct. 23.
NB: If the video trailer doesn’t launch, please visit our home page.
I recently discovered this wonderful illustration titled Bookaholic and Bibliophile. Created by Ukrainian artists Romana Romanyshyn and Andriy Lesiv, it features two charming, whimsical creatures embracing each other while maintaining engagement with their books. Cat-like and bird-like, one in high heels and one barefoot, one with a long tail and prominent ears and one with tail feathers and no visible ears, both with beaks, and both with books.
Romanyshyn and Lesiv are both natives of, and continue to live and work in Lviv, Ukraine. After meeting in art school, together they started Art Studio Agrafka in Lviv where they produce award-winning books and illustrations.
I’ve been a fan of the Symbolist painter Hugo Simberg (1873-1917) since I first saw his work in his native Finland decades ago. His best known work The Garden of Death (above) was created for the Tampere Cathedral along with a series of frecos. I don’t know why Simberg’s painting get so little attention, so I was surprised to see images of his work pop-up on two unrelated blogs this week.
The Kansallisgalleria (Finnish National Gallery) in Helsinki maintains an extensive archive of Simberg’s graphics and paintings, but it’s rare to discover his work elsewhere. Many of his paintings take an unflinching, if humorous, look at death and dying. Here are just a few from the series. A brief biography on the artist can be found at wikipedia.
I thought the earth
remembered me, she
took me back so tenderly, arranging
her dark skirts, her pockets
full of lichens and seeds. I slept
as never before, a stone
on the riverbed, nothing
between me and the white fire of the stars
but my thoughts, and they floated
light as moths among the branches
of the perfect trees. All night
I heard the small kingdoms breathing
around me, the insects, and the birds
who do their work in the darkness. All night
I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling
with a luminous doom. By morning
I had vanished at least a dozen times
into something better.
by Mary Oliver
from News of the Universe
Poems of Twofold Consciousness Sierra Club Books, 1980
Travel Between The Pages 