I recently discovered the dubious concept of Beforehand Postcards. The conceit behind Beforehand Postcards was that, if you were going on vacation to Europe, you could buy your postcards from them beforehand. Then you could address the cards, and maybe even write them, before you left. Once you arrived in Europe, all you would have to do was mail them.
The business lasted a little over ten years, from the early 1970s to the mid 1980s.
The author Rainer Maria Rilke anticipated the inevitable shortcomings in the use of AI in the arts. He articulated the essential conditions for creativity in his only novel, reflecting on what it takes to compose a great poem, but also addressing what it takes to create anything of beauty and substance :
For the sake of a few lines one must see many cities, men and things. One must know the animals, one must feel how the birds fly and know the gesture with which the small flowers open in the morning. One must be able to think back to roads in unknown regions, to unexpected meetings and to partings which one has long seen coming; to days of childhood that are still unexplained, to parents that one had to hurt when they brought one some joy and one did not grasp it (it was a joy for someone else); to childhood illness that so strangely began with a number of profound and grave transformations, to days in rooms withdrawn and quiet and to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to seas, to nights of travel that rushed along on high and flew with all the stars — and it is not yet enough if one may think of all of this. One must have memories of many nights of love, none of which was like the others, of the screams of women in labor, and of light, white, sleeping women in childbed, closing again. But one must also have been beside the dying, one must have sat beside the dead in the room with the open window and the fitful noises.
I frequently find myself baffled by abbreviations and acronyms that I run across both online and IRL. It’s particularly confusing when one is traveling in another country and the acronyms are hyper local. So, I was happy to stumble on the very informative website Abbreviations.com Here’s what it’s all about:
We are the world’s largest and most comprehensive directory and search engine for acronyms, abbreviations, and initialisms on the Internet.
Abbreviations.com holds hundreds of thousands of entries organized by a large variety of categories from computing and the Web to governmental, medicine, and business.
It is maintained and expanded by a large community of passionate editors.
Many, many years ago, I lived in the university town of Gainesville, Florida. One of the many limitations of the small city was its not so great transportation services, including a sorry little airport. But now the Alachua County Regional Airport even features a book vending machine highlighting Florida authors, courtesy of Gainesville’s Lynx bookstore. The Gainesville Sun reported that the machine was “unveiled by the Lynx bookstore co-founders Lauren Groff and Clay Kallman, who view the vending machine as a passion project. The hope is that the vending machine will provide book readers and frequent flyers another way to enjoy their flight experience.”
The bookstore shared an Instagram video chronicling the arrival at its new destination and noting that the vending machine “features Florida authors including Zora Neale Hurston, Carl Hiaasen, and Karen Russell. Huge thanks to @oldfloridavibes [Hunter Turner] for the amazing art on the machine!”
You can visit coffee shops in different places around the world in this video. A coffee drink is ordered in nine countries, and we get to watch it through the customer’s POV. Each coffee drink is captioned, indicating its name and ingredients.
When I travel one of the first things that I do is to check out coffeeshops and roasteries where I’m going to be staying and visiting. The amazing variety of coffee drinks always fascinates me, but invariably I get a double espresso or a simple black drip coffee.
PITY THE NATION
by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, 2007
(After Khalil Gibran)
Pity the nation whose people are sheep
And whose shepherds mislead them
Pity the nation whose leaders are liars
Whose sages are silenced
And whose bigots haunt the airwaves
Pity the nation that raises not its voice
Except to praise conquerers
And acclaim the bully as hero
And aims to rule the world
By force and by torture
Pity the nation that knows
No other language but its own
And no other culture but its own
Pity the nation whose breath is money
And sleeps the sleep of the too well fed
Pity the nation oh pity the people
who allow their rights to erode
and their freedoms to be washed away
My country, tears of thee
Sweet land of liberty!
There is writing which resembles the mosaics of glass you see in stained-glass windows. Such windows are beautiful in themselves and let in the light in colored fragments, but you can’t expect to see through them. In the same way, there is poetic writing that is beautiful in itself and can easily affect the emotions, but such writing can be dense and can make for hard reading if you are trying to figure out what’s happening.
Plate glass, on the other hand, has no beauty of its own. Ideally, you ought not to be able to see it at all, but through it you can see all that is happening outside. That is the equivalent of writing that is plain and unadorned. Ideally, in reading such writing, you are not even aware that you are reading. Ideas and events seem merely to flow from the mind of the writer into that of the reader without any barrier between.
— Isaac Asimov, I. Asimov: A Memoir, 1994
In the heart of the Grandmont Rosedale neighborhood in Detroit, a failed bookstore is experiencing a welcome rebirth. Pages Bookshop, a valued independent bookstore, has found new life with the help of the Steen Foundation and a team of dedicated young Detroiters.
Leading the revival is 23-year-old Detroit native Jeremiah Steen. His foundation, launched in 2018, is dedicated to youth empowerment and workforce development. Jeremiah, alongside 24-year-old Grandmont Rosedale resident Jelani Stowers, who now serves as Pages’ general manager, has taken over with more than just financial investment. The pair share a deep-rooted passion for community engagement and literacy.
The new Pages Bookshop hosted a grand opening in April. The event featured community speakers, student performances, and even some wonderful book giveaways. However, the Steen Foundation’s vision for Pages extends beyond traditional bookselling. The new owners plan to transform the space into a multifaceted community hub, complete with art displays and a podcast studio.
Recognizing the importance of accessibility, the new Pages Bookshop plans to extend its reach beyond its physical location. As part of their outreach program, a free traveling book fair will visit various Detroit schools, bringing literature directly to students.
For fantasy is true, of course. It isn’t factual, but it is true. Children know that. Adults know it too, and that is precisely why many of them are afraid of fantasy. They know that its truth challenges, even threatens, all that is false, all that is phony, unnecessary, and trivial in the life they have let themselves be forced into living. They are afraid of dragons, because they are afraid of freedom.
Travel Between The Pages 