Found in translation

Posted on April 19, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

I am usually ambivalent about literary prizes, although like a good hypocrite I mine the lists for reading suggestions. Somehow I missed the announcement for this year’s International Booker Prize and was surprised to discover that I had read three of the six nominees.

 

Launched in 2005, the International Booker Prize was originally given to an author for their life’s work, but since 2016 has been awarded to a single book translated into English and published in Britain or Ireland. It comes with prize money of £50,000, about $64,000, which the winning author and translator share equally.

The six books include Solvej Balle’s “On the Calculation of Volume: 1” about a bookseller who relives the same day over and over again. “Under the Eye of the Big Bird,” by Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda: a series of interconnected stories set in a dystopian future, in which the only remaining humans are produced in factories. Vincenzo Latronico’s “Perfection,” translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes, about an expatriate couple living in a hip Berlin neighborhood and struggling to engage with life outside their bubble.

Also the three that I haven’t read: “Small Boat” by Vincent Delecroix, translated from French by Helen Stevenson: a fictionalized retelling of the 2021 sinking of a migrant boat that capsized on the journey from France to Britain, leading to 27 deaths. “Heart Lamp” by Banu Mushtaq, translated from Kannada, a language spoken in southern India, by Deepa Bhasthi: a collection of short stories about Muslim women in India and dealing with family and community tensions. And, “A Leopard-Skin Hat” by Anne Serre, translated from French by Mark Hutchinson: a novel about the relationship between an unnamed narrator and an anguished friend.

The judges will announce a winner on May 20 during a ceremony at Tate Modern in London.

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Tout le monde aime la Tour Eiffel

Posted on April 18, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

I’m always chuffed to run across a copy book that I sold many years ago in a random blog post. in this case, the book in question is Les Tours Eiffel de Robert Delaunay : poèmes inédits / [Guillaume] Apollinaire. It was originally printed in an edition of 1,150 in Brussels in 1974. 

This work features artwork created by Robert Delaunay (1885-1941), along with previously unpublished poems by renowned and influential poets of the early 20th century. It includes a preface by Jean Cassou (1897-1986), the first director of the National Museum of Modern Art in Paris, who was also a French art critic and poet.

Some of the poets in this collection are notable for their ties to surrealism. French writers and poets André Breton (1896-1966) and Philippe Soupault (1897-1990) co-founded the Surrealist movement, aiming to explore the unconscious mind and challenge the conventional boundaries of art and literature. Guillaume Apollinaire (1880-1918) is regarded as one of the leading poets of the 20th century and is credited with coining the terms “Surrealism,” “Cubism,” and “Orphism,” showcasing the intersection of visual art and poetry in contemporary movements. Louis Aragon (1897-1982), a French novelist, editor, and poet, was one of France’s prominent voices in the Surrealist movement and was deeply involved in both literature and political activism, often reflecting these themes in his works.

Other notable poets included in this collection are Jean Arp, known for his contributions to both Dada and Surrealism; Blaise Cendrars, whose adventurous spirit and modernist style reshaped poetry; Tristan Tzara, a founder of Dada who sought to disrupt traditional artistic norms; Joseph Delteil, whose work often focused on the themes of nature and humanity; and René Crevel, whose works often depicted existential themes.

Robert Delaunay (1885-1941) was a French artist who co-founded the Orphism art movement, which emphasized the use of color and light to evoke emotion and create a sense of movement. Guillaume Apollinaire noted the musical quality in Delaunay’s work, coining “Orphic Cubism” or “Orphism.” This name draws inspiration from the Greek god Orpheus, renowned for his ability to captivate animals with enchanting music played on the lyre. Delaunay saw the Eiffel as a symbol of modernity and masculinity. He was among the first artists to focus his work on this iconic landmark, portraying it numerous times in his work, including his famous series of paintings that capture its dynamic forms and colors.

via

 

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New York’s Secret Gem

Posted on April 17, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

Today marks the official re-opening of one of New York City’s finest art museums after a nearly five year closure for renovation. While the Frick Collection may not be a secret to the city’s art lovers, most visitors to NYC don’t seem to know that it exists.

Once residence to the robber baron Henry Clay Frick (1849-1919), the museum has been undergoing a $220 million renovation and expansion, inside and out. Frick assembled the core collection over a brief few decades, and gifted it to the public. It also celebrates, like many art museums, the complicated power of private wealth. (Frick’s benevolent populism had serious limits; he is notorious in the annals of American labor as an adamant anti-unionist.)

The Frick is an impressive “house” museum, which is much more accessible than the grand Met. In 1935, when the house opened as a museum, it officially transitioned to a monument, one that has been added to more than once over the years.

The renovation, designed by Selldorf Architects with Beyer Blinder Belle Architects and Planners, which includes a two-level reception hall, a coat check, and cafe, and Special Exhibition galleries, where a three-picture blockbuster titled “Vermeer’s Love Letters” will debut in June.

 

Personally, I always go to the Frick for the Vermeers. Frick’s interest in Vermeer was also unusual for a time when the Golden Age Dutch painter was by no means the trophy artist he is now. Frick collected three pictures by him. The two smaller ones hang in a narrow corridor near the skylit Garden Court (added in the 1930s by the architect John Russell Pope). The largest one, the velvety pollen-gold “Mistress and Maid” (1666-67), is in the West Gallery and was the very last painting that Frick bought.

When asked for advice from New York tourists, I encourage the art lovers to make time for the Frick collection. Now with the newly completed renovations, I think that it should be on everyone’s list.

 

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OK Go Budapest

Posted on April 16, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

I have to admit that I think the LA-based band OK Go’s music is just okay. However, they consistently created clever, quirky music videos that are irresistible. Their newest release was filmed in Budapest’s iconic Keleti Station and is a knockout.

Do yourself a favor and what the video below and then watch the amazing video on how the brilliant film was created. it’s well worth the time and loads of fun.

Now, how the sausage was made.

 

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Reading is a means of listening

Posted on April 15, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

Reading is not as passive as hearing or viewing. It’s an act: you do it. You read at your pace, your own speed, not the ceaseless, incoherent, gabbling, shouting rush of the media. You take in what you can and want to take in, not what they shove at you fast and hard and loud in order to overwhelm and control you. Reading a story, you may be told something, but you’re not being sold anything. And though you’re usually alone when you read, you are in communion with another mind. You aren’t being brainwashed or co-opted or used; you’ve joined in an act of the imagination.

I know no reason why our media could not create a similar community of the imagination, as theater has often done in societies of the past, but they’re mostly not doing it. They are so controlled by advertising and profiteering that the best people who work in them, the real artists, if they resist the pressure to sell out, get drowned out by the endless rush for novelty, by the greed of the entrepreneurs.

Much of literature remains free of such co-optation, in part because a lot of books were written by dead people, who by definition are not greedy. And many living poets and novelists, though their publishers may be crawling abjectly after bestsellers, continue to be motivated less by the desire for gain than by the wish to do what they’d probably do for nothing if they could afford it, that is, practice their art—make something well, get something right. Literature remains comparatively, and amazingly, honest and reliable.

Books may not be “books,” of course, they may not be ink on wood pulp but a flicker of electronics in the palm of a hand. Incoherent and commercialised and worm-eaten with porn and hype and blather as it is, electronic publication offers those who read a strong new means of active community. The technology is not what matters. Words are what matter. The sharing of words. The activation of imagination through the reading of words.

The reason literacy is important is that literature is the operating instructions. The best manual we have. The most useful guide to the country we’re visiting, life.

 

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Franz Kafka once called his writing a form of prayer.

Posted on April 14, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

“Not His Best”

by

Joy Williams

from 99 Stories of God

Franz Kafka once called his writing a form of prayer.

He also reprimanded the long-suffering Felice Bauer in a letter: “I did not say that writing ought to make everything clearer, but instead makes everything worse; what I said was that writing makes everything clearer and worse.”

He frequently fretted that he was not a human being and that what he bore on his body was not a human head. Once he dreamt that as he lay in bed, he began to jump out the open window continuously at quarter-hour intervals.

“Then trains came and one after another they ran over my body, outstretched on the tracks, deepening and widening the two cuts in my neck and legs.”

I didn’t give him that one, the Lord said.

NOT HIS BEST

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Sometimes going backwards is good

Posted on April 13, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

The Metropolitan Transportation Authority recently  revealed a revamped map of the city’s subway system that takes its cues from a 1970s throwback that was cheered by design connoisseurs and reviled by many traditionalists. It is the first major overhaul of the subway map to be introduced by the authority in almost 50 years. The current version (above) is serviceable, but takes time to master. The new version (below) is colorful and much easier to read.

“The new map — a brightly colored variation on the current version that sacrifices some geographic detail for clarity — is reminiscent of the 1972 Unimark map, a modernist streamlining of the subways that straightened the curvy contours of the system. The map was short lived, replaced in 1979 by a version resembling the current one.”

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Eggciting Travel News

Posted on April 12, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

Tomorrow marks the opening of the Osaka World Expo, which will run until October 13,2025. The world’s fair, which is being held at Yumeshima Island outside of Osaka, is projected to welcome 28.2 million visitors.

One of Japan’s signature pavilions, Earth Mart, is shaping up to be tasty. Located within the Expo’s Green World zone, Earth Mart will make you rethink and reevaluate the current state of food by exploring new ways of eating through interactive exhibitions and installations. One iconic installation is a chandelier made from 28,000 eggs, a figure that represents the average number of eggs every Japanese person consumes in their lifetime.

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Beyond Gravity’s Rainbow

Posted on April 11, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

Last week, Penguin Random House announced a new novel from Thomas Pynchon. The novel, his first in a decade, is called Shadow Ticket and is set to publish on 7 Oct. 2025. PRH’s copy:

 

Milwaukee 1932, the Great Depression going full blast, repeal of Prohibition just around the corner, Al Capone in the federal pen, the private investigation business shifting from labor-management relations to the more domestic kind. Hicks McTaggart, a one-time strikebreaker turned private eye, thinks he’s found job security until he gets sent out on what should be a routine case, locating and bringing back the heiress of a Wisconsin cheese fortune who’s taken a mind to go wandering. Before he knows it, he’s been shanghaied onto a transoceanic liner, ending up eventually in Hungary where there’s no shoreline, a language from some other planet, and enough pastry to see any cop well into retirement—and of course no sign of the runaway heiress he’s supposed to be chasing. By the time Hicks catches up with her he will find himself also entangled with Nazis, Soviet agents, British counterspies, swing musicians, practitioners of the paranormal, outlaw motorcyclists, and the troubles that come with each of them, none of which Hicks is qualified, forget about being paid, to deal with. Surrounded by history he has no grasp on and can’t see his way around in or out of, the only bright side for Hicks is it’s the dawn of the Big Band Era and as it happens he’s a pretty good dancer. Whether this will be enough to allow him somehow to lindy-hop his way back again to Milwaukee and the normal world, which may no longer exist, is another question.

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“Trimalchio in West Egg.”

Posted on April 10, 2025 by Brian D. Butler

It seems a bit incredible that F. Scott Fitzgerald originally titled the great American novel “Trimalchio in West Egg.”But in the end he called it “The Great Gatsby” and it remains one of the 20th century’s most read and beloved works of fiction.

Today marks a century since the book’s first edition, F. Scott Fitzgerald’s slender novel about a mysterious, lovelorn millionaire living and dying in a Long Island mansion is still among the most widely read American fictions. Like many, I first read Gatsby in high school and have since returned to re-read it many times.

In January 2021, The Great Gatsby finally entered the public domain, allowing any hack to raid the original iconic novel for second rate, rip-off content. Personally, I’m only interested in the genuine article. We can read the Project Gutenberg’s e‑book of the original text, or listen to the free audio book versions of The Great Gatsby. This five hour recording comes courtesy of Nolan Hennelly, and you can stream it below.

 

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