Starting tomorrow you can participate in a brilliant web project featuring the iconic vampire novel by Bram Stoker. Dracula Daily: “Bram Stoker’s Dracula is an epistolary novel – it’s made up of letters, diaries, telegrams, newspaper clippings – and every part of it has a date. The whole story happens between May 3 and November 10. So: Dracula Daily will post a newsletter each day that something happens to the characters, in the same timeline that it happens to them. Now you can read the book via email, in small digestible chunks – as it happens to the characters.”
If you visit TBTP regularly, you are probably aware that I have a bit of a museum obsession. In fact, it’s been said that I never miss the opportunity to visit a museum no matter how small or obscure. Now, I’ve discovered a website that does nothing but explore unusual museums.
Niche Museums is the passion project of Simon Willison. Each week he adds another odd, but interesting attraction to explore. Here’s what he has to say about the project:
Why niche museums? So many reasons:
Once you start looking, there are museums about everything. And they are everywhere!
If someone cared enough about something to create a museum, that thing is interesting.
The smaller the museum is, the more likely you are to meet the person who founded it. These are people you definitely want to meet.
My aim is to add a new museum to this website every week. The most recently added museum is always the first item on the homepage.
A random sample of the website uncovered some great museums that I wouldn’t pass up. For example, the Beat Museum in San Fransico (photo above), which collects memorabilia of the Beat Generation. And the New Orleans Historic Voodoo Museum with a collection that includes antique voodoo dolls, talismans, taxidermy and multiple altars, some of which are used by Voodoo practitioners today.
Every coffeeshop in the world these days seems to be populated by folks busily working on writing projects of some kind. Now a café located in the Koenji district of Tokyo has opened to help writers meet their project goals. The Manuscript Writing Cafe, is designed to operate as supportive space for writers who need to get work done when up against a deadline. It’s not just a gimmick—those are the actual rules in order to use the café, you need to be a writer trying to clear a deadline.
There are several rules that patrons must obey when visiting the Manuscript Writing Cafe. First, you must notify staff of the number of words you need to write, and by when. Every hour, a staff member will come and check in on you. You can choose what tone of voice you would like to have the check-ins: “mild, normal or hard.”
Rates begin at 150 yen for the first 30 minutes and are 300 yen for every hour. If you’re there for 6 hours, that would be 1800 yen. However, if you haven’t finished the work you declared upon entering, the staff will not let you pay. And if you can’t pay, you can’t leave.
The café is equipped for writing with USB ports, Wi-Fi, and computer stands. The cafe also allows customers to bring in food and drink and even have it delivered.
There is fairly wide latitude in what the management considers appropriate writing work. The “manuscript writing” at the coffeeshop includes translation work, proposal writing, layout work, image processing, editing, journalism, fiction and non-fiction writing, etc.. In an English subtitled video below, the manager explains the concept of the cafe:
NB: If the video link doesn’t show please visit the TBTP website directly.
“To be hopeful in bad times is not just foolishly romantic. It is based on the fact that human history is a history not only of cruelty, but also of compassion, sacrifice, courage, kindness.
What we choose to emphasize in this complex history will determine our lives. If we see only the worst, it destroys our capacity to do something. If we remember those times and places—and there are so many—where people have behaved magnificently, this gives us the energy to act, and at least the possibility of sending this spinning top of a world in a different direction.
And if we do act, in however small a way, we don’t have to wait for some grand utopian future. The future is an infinite succession of presents, and to live now as we think human beings should live, in defiance of all that is bad around us, is itself a marvelous victory.”
― Howard Zinn
When I was a little kid my Grandmother used to grudgingly take me to the Brooklyn Library on Flatbush Avenue. She wasn’t much of a reader and never understood how I could spend so much time looking at books. But I have a lifelong love of libraries and feel quite nostalgic about Brooklyn’s. Now, the Brooklyn Public Library is taking steps to make its massive catalog available to as many young people as possible.
Anyone in the United States between the age of 13 and 21 can apply for a free Brooklyn Public Library eCard, which gives access to 350,000 eBooks, 200,000 audiobooks, and online databases. Meanwhile, anyone who already has a Brooklyn Public Library card can now access a list of “frequently challenged books” online and through Libby, its online book-loan app.
Both projects are part of Books UnBanned, a campaign by the Brooklyn Public Library to challenge book bans and censorship in schools. The library is also offering other resources for anyone facing these issues in their town, including an effort to connect people with the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom in the event that they face a challenge at their library.
I have been to Amsterdam more often than any other foreign city. It’s one place that I know I will never be bored. A great way to get around and to get a sense of the importance of the city’s waterfronts is to take some of the local free ferries. It’s a treat on a sunny day to spend time on the waterways, but I have never seen it quite like the day captured in the amazing timelapse video below.
The Port of Amsterdam is one of the busiest seaports in Europe. But it gets really busy when there are tall ships from all over the world. This is a time lapse video taken at the 2015 SAIL maritime festival that shows the port absolutely teeming with ships and boats of all shapes and sizes.
One of the highlights of a trip to Dublin for any bibliophile is a visit to the magnificent Trinity College Library. And the most popular attraction in the library is the amazing 9th century Book of Kells. The devotional text contains the four Gospels of the New Testament. The manuscript’s text was copied onto calf vellum by expert scribes, probably on the Scottish island of Iona. The illuminations are some of the most significant of the period. Known as Insular or Hiberno-Saxon illumination, this style was produced Britain and Ireland the Dark Ages. It is characterized by intricate patterns and colorful images.
Now transparencies of the 680 pages have been rescanned in high resolution so you can zoom and scroll throughout the Book of Kells. You can learn about the symbolism of the elaborate decoration in the video below.
Like many adolescents of my generation who had aspirations to engage in a literary life, I was infatuated with the Beat Generation writers. And while I sussed early on that the Jack Kerouac on the page might not be all that he purported to be irl, I still devoured evey one of his books. As one of the few marketable Beat writers, Kerouac was often asked for advice. He eventually offered 30 essentials ideas in a list titled ‘Belief and Technique for Modern Prose’.
Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
Submissive to everything, open, listening
Try never get drunk outside yr own house
Be in love with yr life
Something that you feel will find its own form
Be crazy dumb-saint of the mind
Blow as deep as you want to blow
Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
The unspeakable visions of the individual
No time for poetry but exactly what is
Visionary tics shivering in the chest
In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
Like Proust be an old teahead of time
Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
The jewel centre of interest is the eye within the eye
Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
Accept loss forever
Believe in the holy contour of life
Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
You’re a Genius all the time
Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
Travel Between The Pages 