2nd Hand Reading

Posted on May 7, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

I’ve long been a fan of South African artist William Kentridge’s eclectic work. His book art/film blend has always captured my attention. 2nd Hand Reading is not recent, but it’s a good introduction to his work.

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The Last Word Spoken

Posted on May 6, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Testimony: 1968
Rita Dove
Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken?
No more princes for the poor. Loss whittling you thin.
Grief is the constant now, hope the last word spoken.In a dance of two elegies, which circles the drain? A token
year with its daisies and carbines is where we begin.
Who comforts you now? That the wheel has brokenis Mechanics 101; to keep dreaming when the joke’s on
you? Well, crazier legends have been written.
Grief is the constant now; hope, the last word spokenon a motel balcony, shouted in a hotel kitchen. No kin
can make this journey for you. The route’s locked in.
Who comforts you now that the wheel has broken

the bodies of its makers? Beyond the smoke and
ashes, what you hear rising is nothing but the wind.
Who comforts you? Now that the wheel has broken,

grief is the constant. Hope: the last word spoken.

Copyright © 2020 by Rita Dove
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the more you use, the more you get back

Posted on May 5, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Regular visitors to TBTP may know that my most recent obsession has been roasting my own coffee beans. Fortunately it’s a pursuit that’s heartily supported by friends and family who benefit from the hours of exploration and experimentation. While researching all things coffee, I sometimes stumble upon quirky coffee related stuff such as the odd little film below. Good Strong Coffee appears to be a short film created in 1968 to market coffee as a product rather than one specific brand. From what I can gather, the brief film was meant to be shown in British cinemas. Although I haven’t discovered who directed this gem, I don’t doubt that the creator was influenced by Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 Pop-noir film Blow-up and the classic TV show The Prisoner. It’s well worth two minutes of your time for this slice of 60s culture. And if you are a true coffee and/or cinema fan, stay for the feature film Coffee and Cigarettes, Jim Jarmusch’s 2003 cult fave. It’s got Tom Waits, Steve Coogan, Cate Blanchett, Steve Buscemi, Iggy Pop, and Bill Murray.

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Plague Dreams

Posted on May 4, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Being an insomniac is not pleasant during the best of times, but during this bizarre pandemic it’s especially challenging. One of the ways that I soothe myself when I am unable to sleep is to recall some of the wonderful places that I’ve been fortunate to visit over the years. If I am really struggling with sleep, I even resort to playing a memory game in which I attempt to recall in detail entire trips. Other times I simply focus on remembering the specifics of an extraordinary place that I’ve been. For example, one of my all time favorite libraries in the world is the spectacular Baroque Klementinium in Prague. When I first saw the library nearly 30 years ago, the city wasn’t yet drowning in tourists and I literally had the place to myself. If you love books, libraries, art, and architecture it is a must destination. Until travel returns to some degree of normality, we will have do with virtual visits.

You can step into the library via its own  360-degree tour and see shelves packed with  literature beneath a ceiling of  stunning frescoes. In addition to housing more than 20,000 books, the library includes a collection of terrestrial and celestial globes. You can also explore nearby chambers, such as the  public reading room flanked by massive frescoes and an observatory in the astronomical tower.

 

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Harry Potter and The Handmaid’s Tale

Posted on May 3, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

The American Library Association recently released its annual list of the Top 10 Most Challenged Books, included as part of its 2020 State of America’s Libraries report. This report offers an annual summary of library trends, statistics and issues affecting all types of libraries during the previous year.

Here in the U.S., despite the naysayers, the popularity of libraries continues to increase.   Adults report an average of 10.5 trips per year to the library, which exceeds the amount of trips made to movie theaters, museums or zoos. The report also found a trend of libraries becoming “libraries of things,” and offering collections of items like “mattresses, dolls, bicycles, binoculars and accordions.”

Sadly, the also report found a 17% increase in the number of books targeted for removal or restriction, the majority of them featuring or addressing LGBTQIA+ content. The ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom tracked 377 challenges in 2019, with 566 books targeted overall. The most frequently challenged titles last year were:

  1. George by Alex Gino
  2. Beyond Magenta: Transgender Teens Speak Out by Susan Kuklin
  3. Last Week Tonight with John Oliver Presents A Day in the Life of Marlon Bundo by Jill Twiss, illustrated by EG Keller
  4. Sex Is a Funny Word by Cory Silverberg, illustrated by Fiona Smyth
  5. Prince & Knight by Daniel Haack, illustrated by Stevie Lewis Reasons
  6. I Am Jazz by Jessica Herthel and Jazz Jennings, illustrated by Shelagh McNicholas
  7. The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood
  8. Drama, written and illustrated by Raina Telgemeier
  9. The Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling
  10. And Tango Makes Three by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson, illustrated by Henry Cole Reason
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Literary Conflicts

Posted on May 2, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

 

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High Up and Beyond the Crisis

Posted on May 1, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

Last week,the renowned French street artist Guillaume Legros (aka Saype) created an enormous and emotionally moving work in the Swiss alps above the town of Leysin. Using his innovative technique that is based on spraying naturally derived , biodegradable pigments, he has produced a large landart mural directly on the mountainside.

Legros describes the work as: “This fresco of more than 3000 m2 evokes the construction of a more united and more human world transcribed by this little girl who looks towards the horizon. This farandole drawn in an arc, which reminds us of the shape of the corona virus, reminds us that it is in these moments of crisis that we must look together to the future.”

Photos Valentin Flauraud for Saype

 

 

 

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Keep a sharp lookout

Posted on April 30, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

“The Peasant and the Cucumbers”

by Leo Tolstoy

(trans. by Leo Wiener)

A peasant once went to the gardener’s, to steal cucumbers. He crept up to the cucumbers, and thought:

“I will carry off a bag of cucumbers, which I will sell; with the money I will buy a hen. The hen will lay eggs, hatch them, and raise a lot of chicks. I will feed the chicks and sell them; then I will buy me a young sow, and she will bear a lot of pigs. I will sell the pigs, and buy me a mare; the mare will foal me some colts. I will raise the colts, and sell them. I will buy me a house, and start a garden. In the garden I will sow cucumbers, and will not let them be stolen, but will keep a sharp watch on them. I will hire watchmen, and put them in the cucumber patch, while I myself will come on them, unawares, and shout: ‘Oh, there, keep a sharp lookout!’”

And this he shouted as loud as he could. The watchmen heard it, and they rushed out and beat the peasant.

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Adventures in Writing

Posted on April 29, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

 

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NYC: A Day in the Life

Posted on April 28, 2020 by Brian D. Butler

The cover of this week’s New Yorker magazine features a wonderful still life by cartoonist   Chris Ware. He drew several vignettes of New York City arranged in his now iconic grid to accompany this incredible piece about a single day of the virus crisis in the city. About the cover, Ware wrote:

Teeming with unpredictable people and unimaginable places and unforeseeable moments, life there is measured not in hours but in densely packed minutes that can fill up a day with a year’s worth of life. Lately, however, closed up in our homes against a worldwide terror, time everywhere has seemed to slur, to become almost Groundhog Day-ish, forced into a sort of present-perfect tense — or, as my fellow New Yorker contributor Masha Gessen more precisely put it, ‘loopy, dotted, and sometimes perpendicular to itself.’ But disaster can also have a recalibrating quality. It reminds us that the real things of life (breakfast, grass, spouse) can, in normal times, become clotted over by anxieties and nonsense. We’re at low tide, but, as my wife, a biology teacher, said to me this morning, “For a while, we get to just step back and look.” And really, when you do, it is pretty marvellous.

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