I was recently reminded to visit the wonderful website Neglected Books which reviews and writes up books which are, as the name says, neglected. It features authors who have fallen out of fashion, obscure imprints, anything that’s a bit musty and lost in the stacks of time. If you’re love books and literature then this is an absolute treasure trove. Within minutes, I hit on a link to Rockwell Kent’s memoir A Journal of Quiet Adventure in Alaska .The book, which the author illustrated himself, is one of those titles that this bookseller/collector kicks himself for selling and not keeeping for his personal library. You can see the full edition right here on the Internet Archive.
Neglected Books’ editor Brad Bigelow also offers some excellent long reads on writers that we all think we know, but may not really. For example, he recently posted a story titled Simenon’s romans Américains exploring the once widely popular Belgian mystery writer’s time in the United States.
“Paul Delvaux: The Village of the Mermaids”
by
Lisel Mueller
Who is that man in black, walking
away from us into the distance?
The painter, they say, took a long time
finding his vision of the world.
The mermaids, if that is what they are
under their full-length skirts,
sit facing each other
all down the street, more of an alley,
in front of their gray row houses.
They all look the same, like a fair-haired
order of nuns, or like prostitutes
with chaste, identical faces.
How calm they are, with their vacant eyes,
their hands in laps that betray nothing.
Only one has scales on her dusky dress.
It is 1942; it is Europe,
and nothing fits. The one familiar figure
is the man in black approaching the sea,
and he is small and walking away from us.
As I have previously mentioned, I have long been an enormous fan of London as a travel destination. In fact, during the previous century I even wrote a travel guidebook for budget travel to the British capital. But I was surprised to discover that there is a small museum in the Stockwell neighborhood dedicated to Vincent Van Gogh and his time living in the very same house.
In 1873, Van Gogh moved to London to work for the family’s art dealership. Although he had some success in the business, little is known about the painter’s time in Britain. He rented rooms in a modest house in Stockwell, but was apparently involved in a love triangle with his landlady’s young daughter Eugenia Loyer and was forced to exit London for Paris to escape parental wrath.
Little was known about Van Gogh’s London sojourn, and in fact the location of his London lodgings was a mystery until 1971 when a drawing was found of the house at 87 Hackfor Road. While it was known that Van Gogh had lived in Stockwell, the precise address had yet to be determined. The 87 Hackford Road’s link to the artist was only discovered in 1971 by postman and avid Van Gogh enthusiast Paul Chalcroft, who took it upon himself to locate Van Gogh’s London home during a postal strike.
The house at 87 Hackford Road is a Grade II listed building that has been renovated and conserved by the Wang family. Built in the 1820s, by 2012 the house had fallen into a state of disrepair. Fortunately, the building was purchased at auction by James Wang and Alice Childs, who saw the potential to restore the property and turn it into a museum and art center. Since 2019, the house has been open for events centered on Van Gogh’s career, exhibitions by local artists,and local heritage displays. The museum is open Wednesday through Sunday 12 to 6PM.
Many decades ago, when I first visited Europe it was possible to travel all over the continent by night train. As a low budget, backpacker, I often used night trains to save the cost of overnight accomodations by traveling at night and sleeping in a regular train compartment. Although occasionally there was a big splurge on a bunk in a 4 or 6 bed couchette. Sadly, over the years night trains fell out of favor with rail companies and travelers often opted for budget flights. However, the night train is making a comeback.
Now that train travel has been recognized as a climate-friendly alternative to air travel, Greenpeace has suggested that banning short-haul flights in the EU and shifting to rail where alternatives under six hours already exist would cut emissions by 3.5 million tons of CO2 equivalents each year. With sufficient investment in rail, the EU could replace most of its 250 short-haul flights by rail travel, saving 23.4 million tons of CO2 equivalents per year.
Although night trains are still less available than they used to be, they are making a comeback across Europe. Services such as Nightjet (pictured above) are once again linking major cities with fast, comfortable overnight trains.
Now, the German Green Party has launched a project dubbed the“Euro Night Sprinter” rail network to connect hundred of European cities by night trains. Consisting of 40 long-distance lines, the proposed system would run from Portugal in the west to Ukraine in the east, and from Finland in the north to Spain in the south.
Run by by the European Rail Agency. the network would field night trains traveling across Europe at 200 to 250 km/h (125 to 155 mph). Planners have calculated that most trips would take between 9 and 14 hours.
While sustainability is an excellent argument in favor of night train travel, it’s also a much more relaxing way to get from city to city. A few years ago, I did a multi-city, four country trip mostly by budget plane travel and I found it so much more stressful than train travel. So, I’m all for more night trains.
Singer/songwriter/performance artist and actress Solange recently announced via her Saint Heron foundation that she would use the organization’s website to host a free digital library of rare works by Black writers and artists. The Saint Heron Community Library includes “stories and works we deem valuable,” which are available to borrow. A statement on their website lays out the mission, describing the SHCL as:
…a growing media center dedicated to students, practicing artists and designers, musicians and general literature enthusiasts. We believe our community is deserving of access to the stylistically expansive range of Black and Brown voices in poetry, visual art, critical thought and design.
The new library collection is being organized by a rotating list of curators, each of whom will add their own chosen works. The first tranche of literature has been selected by Rosa Duffy of the Community Bookstore, Atlanta, GA, and includes poetry by Audre Lorde, science fiction by Octavia Butler, and short stories by Nadine Gordimer.
Solange described the project this way:
These works expand imaginations, and it is vital to us to make them accessible to students, and our communities for research and engagement, so that the works are integrated into our collective story and belong and grow with us… I look forward to the Saint Heron library continuously growing and evolving and over the next decade becoming a sacred space for literature and expressions for years to come.
Visit the Saint Heron Community Library to see a full selection of available works, as well as more information on the project.
The winner of the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award for the Best Short Science Fiction of 2020 was recently announced. It turned out to be a very timely selection. Rebecca Campbell’s novella “An Important Failure” explores creation in the face of the climate catastrophe.
It’s 1607 (according to some calendars) and a falling cone from an elderly Pinaceae sitchensis catches on the rotting bark of a nurse log that sprouted while Al-Ma’mun founded the House of Wisdom in Baghdad. On this particular north Pacific island, the days are cold, and the water in Kaatza—the big lake near where this cone has fallen—freezes thick enough that one can walk out from the villages at the southeast end and look down to see cutthroat trout flickering underfoot. On the other side of the world, the Thames has also frozen, and stout winter children play across the canvasses of lowland painters, who preserve in oil the white-stained landscapes of northern Europe. In il Bosco Che Suona—the Valley of Song, the singing forest in the Alps north of Cremona where luthiers go to find their violins hidden in the trunks of trees—the winter is bitter, slowing the growth of Picea abies until its rings are infinitesimal, a dense tonewood unlike any material before or since.
Ninety years after the cone drops near Kaatza, Antonio Stradivari travels to il Bosco Che Suona on the old road from Cremona to select wood for his workshop. He rests his head against one trunk and listens to its cold history. This is the Little Ice Age as written in the rings of a spruce tree. It sounds like a violin.
You can read the rest of Campbell’s novella right here and many more of the 2020 award nominees right here.
Regular visitors to Travel Between The Pages are well aware that I am an insufferable map nerd. When I travel, I still insist on carrying multiple paper maps along with the usual digital map apps and downloaded maps to my travel destinations too. It’s my long held conviction that maps not only tell us where we are at and where we are going, but where we come from and how we got there.
I recently stumble on the fascinating story 35 History Maps That Will Make You See The World In A Whole New Light right here. The historical maps show how empires have risen and fallen throughout the centuries., how religion and cultures have spread across the globe, how wars have shaped nations, and much more.
The recent news stories about the verification of Viking settlement of North America centuries prior to Columbus make the map above even more intriguing.
Travel Between The Pages 