To be hopeful in bad times

Posted on April 28, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

To Be Hopeful in Bad Times

“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

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Another Reason To Love Brooklyn

Posted on April 27, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

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.

Young people who want to apply for the free eCard can send an email to BooksUnbanned@bklynlibrary.org or a message to @bklynfuture on Instagram.

 

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Amsterdam: On the Waterfront

Posted on April 26, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

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.

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Book of Kells

Posted on April 25, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

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.

 

 

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Worst Book Ever

Posted on April 24, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

 

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Belief and Technique for Modern Prose

Posted on April 23, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

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’.

  1. Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages, for yr own joy
  2. Submissive to everything, open, listening
  3. Try never get drunk outside yr own house
  4. Be in love with yr life
  5. Something that you feel will find its own form
  6. Be crazy dumb-saint of the mind
  7. Blow as deep as you want to blow
  8. Write what you want bottomless from bottom of the mind
  9. The unspeakable visions of the individual
  10. No time for poetry but exactly what is
  11. Visionary tics shivering in the chest
  12. In tranced fixation dreaming upon object before you
  13. Remove literary, grammatical and syntactical inhibition
  14. Like Proust be an old teahead of time
  15. Telling the true story of the world in interior monolog
  16. The jewel centre of interest is the eye within the eye
  17. Write in recollection and amazement for yourself
  18. Work from pithy middle eye out, swimming in language sea
  19. Accept loss forever
  20. Believe in the holy contour of life
  21. Struggle to sketch the flow that already exists intact in mind
  22. Don’t think of words when you stop but to see picture better
  23. Keep track of every day the date emblazoned in yr morning
  24. No fear or shame in the dignity of yr experience, language & knowledge
  25. Write for the world to read and see yr exact pictures of it
  26. Bookmovie is the movie in words, the visual American form
  27. In praise of Character in the Bleak inhuman Loneliness
  28. Composing wild, undisciplined, pure, coming in from under, crazier the better
  29. You’re a Genius all the time
  30. Writer-Director of Earthly movies Sponsored & Angeled in Heaven
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Calmly we walk through this April’s day

Posted on April 22, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

CALMLY WE WALK THROUGH THIS APRIL’S DAY

Delmore Schwartz

Calmly we walk through this April’s day,
Metropolitan poetry here and there,
In the park sit pauper and rentier,
The screaming children, the motor-car
Fugitive about us, running away,
Between the worker and the millionaire
Number provides all distances,
It is Nineteen Thirty-Seven now,
Many great dears are taken away,
What will become of you and me
(This is the school in which we learn …)
Besides the photo and the memory?
(… that time is the fire in which we burn.)

(This is the school in which we learn …)
What is the self amid this blaze?
What am I now that I was then
Which I shall suffer and act again,
The theodicy I wrote in my high school days
Restored all life from infancy,
The children shouting are bright as they run
(This is the school in which they learn …)
Ravished entirely in their passing play!

(… that time is the fire in which they burn.)

Avid its rush, that reeling blaze!
Where is my father and Eleanor?
Not where are they now, dead seven years,
But what they were then?
                                     No more? No more?
From Nineteen-Fourteen to the present day,
Bert Spira and Rhoda consume, consume
Not where they are now (where are they now?)

But what they were then, both beautiful;

Each minute bursts in the burning room,
The great globe reels in the solar fire,
Spinning the trivial and unique away.
(How all things flash! How all things flare!)
What am I now that I was then?
May memory restore again and again
The smallest color of the smallest day:
Time is the school in which we learn,
Time is the fire in which we burn.
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What Time Do We Eat

Posted on April 21, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

A big tip of the hat to @loverofgeography for this very helpful and informative map. When I travel I try and adjust meal times to coincide with local eating habits, but I just can’t do the late night dinners in Spain and Greece. I have, however, found that it’s possible to get an evening meal in those countries more conducive to good digestion and still avoid tourist restaurants. The simple secret is to just ask a local. Bon appetit !

 

 

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Kyiv Forever

Posted on April 20, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

With all of the horrendous news coverage from the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the brutal devastation of its cities and town it’s easy to forget that just a short time ago it was a normal European nation. The wonderful time-lapse, tiltshift video below captures the vibrant charm of Kyiv last summer. The video was created by Joerg Daiber for Little Big World.

NB: If the video fails to play, please click the short url link at the bottom.

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Personal Anthologies

Posted on April 19, 2022 by Brian D. Butler

For the last five years, the writer Jonathan Gibbs has curated a project called A Personal Anthology, where guest editors provide a dozen short story selections. Sometimes the anthologies are Greatest Hits, sometimes they’re personal favorites or central to the development of the editor’s own writing, sometimes they’re themed. Since its launch in 2017 the project has featured over 160 guest editors picking over 2,000 short stories written by over 1,000 different authors.

The most recent Personal Anthology, posted by Jamie Popowich, includes one of my favorite overlooked American writers of the 2oth century, Charles Willeford. Here’s what Popowich has to say about choosing Willeford :

“My oversized opinion of Willeford is that he’s one of the most important American writers of the second half of the twentieth century. Because he was a genre writer who wrote dark, critical, comedies about the male psyche, and because his male protagonists were almost always misogynistic, arrogant, assholes, Willeford was never going to attract the popular readership. But Willeford had the vibe of where America was at the end of WWII and where it was heading in the twenty-first century. For such a long-time reader of Willeford I’ll never forgive myself for not seeing where the US was headed five years ago – being run by a shady Willeford type, a kind of used car salesman in a bad suit and terrible hair.

‘Citizen’s Arrest’ is a perfect example of what Willeford excels at. A guy sees a thief steal a lighter at a department store and tries, and fails, to do have the thief arrested. There’s a great description of the lighter. A conversation with the thief who explains his routine. And a perfect last line of the story as the blame is turned on the narrator when a police officer asks, “Now, sir, what is your name?”

What Willeford excels at is that he has never cheated the last line of any of his books or stories. His last lines are a masterclass in endings. They may not leave you feeling good about the situation you just read but their truth never makes you feel ripped off. They are both a summation, a revelation, and an often bitter truth that the reader wasn’t expecting.”

First published in Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, 1966. Reprinted in The Second Half of the Double Feature, Wit’s End Books, 2003

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