Travel Between The Pages

Meditate on This

Posted on May 27, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

My saving grace during this pandemic has been my long time meditation practice. Along with my personal practice, I have been able to engage in daily online group meditation with like minded folks around the world. Don’t worry, I’m not about to proselytize on the benefits of mindfulness and meditation, but I will suggest some wonderful, accessible books on the subject.

Although I’ve had many opportunities to learn about meditation over the years, it didn’t really stick for me until I began to read Thich Nhat Hanh’s writings and subsequently studied mediation with a teacher from his sangha. One of his best, and most engaging books is Peace Is Every Step. Here’s what none other than the Dalai Lama has to say about in the introduction:

Peace Is Every Step is a guidebook for a journey in exactly this direction. 
Thich Nhat Hanh begins by teaching mindfulness of breathing and 
awareness of the small acts of our daily lives, then shows us how to use the 
benefits of mindful-ness and concentration to transform and heal difficult 
psychological states. Finally he shows us the connection between personal, 
inner peace and peace on Earth. This is a very worthwhile book. It can 
change individual lives and the life of our society.

If you’re interested in checking out this beautiful book, you can read it for free here online.

The books below are also excellent introductions to mindfulness and meditation from a range of perspectives. I am especially inclined towards the valuable and groundbreaking work of Jon Kabat-Zinn who is probably more instrumental in bring an approachable, secular version of meditation to the West than any other teacher.

Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life is his inspiring, often poetic, introduction to meditation, what he calls “the process by which we go about deepening our attention and awareness, refining them, and putting them to greater practical use in our lives.”

After he suffered an on-air panic attack in 2004, ABC News anchor Dan Harris began to meditate. Since then, the self-described “evangelist” for the practice has written a bestselling book, launched a weekly podcast and created the popular 10 Percent Happier app. During the pandemic, Harris has also been hosting a daily short meditation session with some of North America’s best meditation teachers live from his NYC apartment. In January 2016, Harris and meditation teacher Jeff Warren took an 11-day cross-country trip to spread the meditation gospel. Meditation for Fidgety Skeptics: A 10% Happier How-to Book recounts that journey, in an entertaining story of their interactions with new and experienced meditators and simple guide for anyone new to meditation, or just interested in learning more.

If you have dipped your toes into the meditation waters before, but don’t have a regular practice, any book by the beloved teacher Pema Chödrön is highly recommended. Her book How to Meditate: A Practical Guide to Making Friends with Your Mind describes the basics of mindfulness meditation, as well guidance about working with difficult emotions and incorporating sounds, sights and bodily sensations into one’s practice.

Posted in apps, Books, ebooks, USA, Writing | Tagged Dan Harris, Jon Kabat-Zinn, mindfulness, Mindfulness Meditation, Thich Nhat Hanh | 3 Comments

Parked at Home

Posted on May 26, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Here in the United States some of our most popular National Parks are starting to re-open. Yellowstone National Park re-opened last week, so did Grand Teton and Grand Canyon National Parks, along with a dozen or so others. The National Park Service created this clever series of posters to address safety concerns. I’m in no hurry to visit any popular tourist destination, but these posters are encouraging.

You can see the rest, download them all, print them out, frame them, do what you like, right here.

Posted in Art, Tourism, USA | Tagged Grand Canyon, National Parks, Yellowstone | 5 Comments

Vienna is like…

Posted on May 25, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

I don’t know anything about the short film below titled Vienna is like… except that it was directed by the award winning Argentine filmmaker Fernando Livschitz. But if love Wien half as much as I do, you will adore this very clever, unusual film.

Posted in Architecture, Europe, Freedom of Speech, Tourism | Tagged Austria, Film, Vienna, Wien | Leave a comment

Excursions into humor + despair

Posted on May 24, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

The Detroit-based publisher Rotland Press advertises itself as “a fine publisher of excursions into humor + despair.” It is also the perfect vehicle for a literary and arts journal to help us cope with the overwhelming nature of the Covid-19 epidemic. This week they issued the second installment of The Plague Review, which is a compelling compilation of art, poetry, comics, essays, interviews and more.

Rotland’s publisher and Plague Review editor Ryan Standfest writes in his opening editor’s note, “In keeping with the mission of Rotland Press, The Plague Review presents a collection of responses to this moment that engenders the need to give form to collective trauma. Addressing that which challenges our lives at this time, the voices in this publication swing wildly from hope to grief, from intimate joy to overwhelming outrage. From visual makers and thinkers around the world who have worked toward evoking and representing that which is subjectively felt and not directly observed, strategies of thought contemplation mingle with mordantly humored bursts of enthusiastic despair. Collectively, the work contained herein represents a vital attempt at getting a psychic foothold within a pit where the fissures are often difficult to see.”

The Plague Review is free as a digital read until COVID-19 ends. At that point, the issues will be printed in a limited run. Check it out in full here. Also, consider purchasing some of Rotland’s previous publications to support this excellent small press.

Posted in Art, Books, Photography, Uncategorized, USA, Writing | Tagged essays, Literary journals, Poetry, small press | Leave a comment

How to find that book without the title

Posted on May 23, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

If you are like me there are times that you are searching for a specific book but don’t remember or don’t know the title. The video below and this article from the website Make Use Of has some great ideas that could help. Suggestions include using Google Book Search, BookFinder, WorldCat, The Library of Congress, and Ask a Librarian.

Posted in Books, Libraries, USA, Writing | Tagged Google Book Search, Library of Congress, WorldCat | Leave a comment

Discovering the Lost Generation in Paris

Posted on May 22, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Decades ago, I made my first biblio-pilgrimage to the iconic Shakespeare and Company bookstore in Paris. These days it’s not quite the same place now that it has an adjoining café that serves American bagels and brownies. And then there are the philistine Instagramers who mob the store and don’t even pick up a book. Still, the bookshop is imbued with the spirits of some of the 20th century’s greatest writers and artists.

Recently, Princeton University launched a project to digitize records from the bookshop and the little known lending library that Shakespeare and Company offered select patrons. This overdue project provides tantalizing glimpses of Paris during the interwar years, revealing the reading habits of literary giants including Walter Benjamin,James Joyce,Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce, Simone de Beauvoir, and Gertrude Stein.

When Sylvia Beach opened Shakespeare and Company in 1919, English-language books were expensive and hard to find in Paris. Writers and artists who had flocked to the capital of literary modernism rushed to sign up for Beach’s library service. Joshua Kotin, an associate professor of English at Princeton and the project’s director, said that Beach was a “meticulous, obsessive record keeper”, and that “we are only now developing digital tools that will allow us to understand and realise the archive’s potential”.

One of Hemingway’s lending cards, Shakespeare and Company. Photograph: Shakespeare and Company

“We want to understand genius,” Kotin said. “Does what Hemingway read help us understand what he wrote and why it is so great? It is also fascinating to connect our everyday practices – what we borrow from our local library, what’s in our Amazon cart – to the practices of people in the past. And there’s something illicit about learning about what and how people read – we’re learning about a very private, solitary activity.

Posted in Books, Bookstore Tourism, Europe, History, Libraries, Tourism, Writing | Tagged Ernest Hemingway, Gertrude Stein, Paris, Princeton University Library, Shakespeare and Company, Simone de Beauvoir | 1 Comment

Rearranging My Book Shelves

Posted on May 21, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Posted in Art, Books, Libraries | Tagged bookshelves, Cartoons, Comics | Leave a comment

What Do Lou Reed and Agatha Christie Have in Common

Posted on May 20, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

What Lou Reed and Agatha Christie have in common is the American-born, but British-raised illustrator Tom Adams. When Reed was searching for an artist to design his self-titled album for the UK market in 1972, he chose Adams. Ironically, although the artist was known in Britain for creating rock concert posters and album covers, Reed selected him based on his book cover design work. Along most of John Fowles’ novels, Adams also did the cover art for a poplar series of reissued Christie mysteries. The paperback covers were created for Collins UK and Simon & Schuster in the USA. Two monographs have been published on his work: Tom Adams’ Agatha Christie Cover Story (published as Agatha Christie: The Art of Her Crimes in the United States), Paper Tiger, 1981 and Tom Adams Uncovered, HarperCollins, 2015.

According to Wikipedia:

Adams’s book cover artwork, while usually instantly recognizable, runs to quite distinct modes. Some covers are still-life tableaux; some are depictions of a scene in the novel; some are surrealist collations of items and images. Organizing the vast majority of them, however, is Adams’s unique exploration of a form that was vital for much of twentieth-century art: the collage.

Adams’s unique take on this was to bring the collage back into the realm of the painterly. Seen in this light, even Adams’s covers that seem like still lifes are, in actuality, juxtapositions of elements and objects that normally are not in such proximity. It is this uncanny proximity—despite (or, rather, precisely because of) the near photo-realistic accuracy—that creates the unsettling effect.

This element also goes to explain one of the most distinctive features of Adams’s art: the combination of a sought-after realistic accuracy with an unsettling, surrealist, if not alienating, effect. As Janet Morgan, Agatha Christie’s first biographer, put it, Adams’s drawings are “alarmingly realistic.”

Posted in Art, Books, Europe, Music, USA, Writing | Tagged book cover art, Book design, Lou Reed | 1 Comment

The Great American Book Giveaway

Posted on May 19, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Gold Beach Books is the second largest bookstore in Oregon and like most folks in the bookselling biz these days they have been closed due to the pandemic. But the four sisters who own the store came up with a clever and altruistic project to address the plague.

Not long after they were forced to shutter Gold Beach Books the family launched their Great American Book Giveaway. The project began as a simple, generous plan to offer readers a free book in the genre of their choice with free shipping thrown in as well. At first, they received 10 or 15 requests a day, a few hundred in total during the first two weeks of the giveaway. But once they started attracting social media coverage thousands of book requests flooded in. Eventually, they were forced to end the giveaway due to the enormous cost.

Over the course of the giveaway, Gold Beach Books mailed an undisclosed number of books (they acknowledge that it was in the low thousands) to ever U.S. state. Happily, in return they have received hundreds of thank you messages and unsolicited donations from book recipients.As a result of the book giveaway, the bookstore received a small spike in online sales. But that wasn’t the point behind the project.

So, if you would like to support an indie bookstore during the pandemic Gold Beach Books is an excellent choice. Check out their website for information on the massive stock of secondhand, rare, collectible and new books.