It’s just Kurt Vonnegut talking to his wife about going out to get an envelope (we’re here on earth to fart around):
So, I know nothing about the Grime music scene in the UK, but I do know a bit about London and its trains. I love this video and catchy song which puts rappers Jme and 8syn into tiny London in this short film.
Miniature versions of the two rappers perform amongst a model version of a London underground station, which subverts the innocent charm of traditional model villages.
Embracing the charming aesthetic of Nineties kids TV, it’s a playful and self-referential promo with plenty of standout visual moments – including some rather unusual transformations.
It’s one of the most famous images in pop culture: the four members of the Beatles — John Lennon, Ringo Starr, Paul McCartney and George Harrison — striding single-file over a zebra-stripe crossing on Abbey Road, near EMI Studios in St. John’s Wood, London.
The photograph was taken on the late morning of August 8, 1969 for the cover of the Beatles’ last-recorded album, Abbey Road. The idea was McCartney’s. He made a sketch and handed it to Iain Macmillan, a freelance photographer who was chosen for the shoot by his friends Lennon and Yoko Ono.
Macmillan had only ten minutes to capture the image. A policeman stopped traffic while the photographer set up a ladder in the middle of the road and framed the image in a Hasselblad camera. The Beatles were all dressed in suits by Savile Row tailor Tommy Nutter — except Harrison, who wore denim. It was a hot summer day. Midway through the shoot, McCartney kicked off his sandals and walked barefoot. Macmillan took a total of only six photos as the musicians walked back and forth over the stripes. The fifth shot was the one.
Since then, the crossing on Abbey Road has become a pilgrimage site for music fans from all over the world. Every day, motorists idle their engines for a moment while tourists reenact the Beatles’ crossing. It’s a special place, and filmmaker Chris Purcell captures the sense of meaning it has for people in his thoughtful 2012 documentary, Why Don’t We Do It In the Road? The five-minute film, narrated by poet Roger McGough, won the 2012 “Best Documentary“ award at the UK Film Festival and the “Best Super Short” award at the NYC Independent Film Festival. When you’ve finished watching the film, you can take a live look at the crosswalk on the 24-hour Abbey Road Crossing Webcam.
Regular visitors to Travel Between The Pages are well aware of my public transit fandom. Although I grew up riding the New York City subways, I never appreciated how good an urban rail system could be until I spent four months riding the rails throughout Europe. The Subways of Europe website is a celebration of those cities that have “a picturesque as well as historically interesting underground transportation network to explore”. The images favor a very much architectural style – empty of people but beautifully-lit, and focusing on stonework and tiling and atria and all that sort of thing. Even if you are not the type to geek-out over public transit, the website is worth a browse.
The Book of the Marvels of the World, an illustrated guide to the globe filled with oddities, curiosities, and wonders for the medieval armchair traveler exhibition opened this week at The Morgan Library & Museum in New York City.
Running January 24 through May 25, The Book of Marvels: Imagining the Medieval World is at the center of the exhibition which brings together two of the four surviving copies of this rare text – one from the Morgan’s collection, the other from the J. Paul Getty Museum – to examine medieval conceptions and misconceptions of a global world.
The related works on display bring to life the world of the Book of Marvels. Together, these objects demonstrate how foreign cultures were imagined in the Middle Ages and what the assumptions of medieval Europeans reveal about their own beliefs and biases. The exhibition also features Persian and Ottoman manuscripts that engage the theme from a non-European perspective.
Accounts of marvels were a primary way for pre-modern people across many cultures to learn about distant lands. Stretching the limits of imagination, these accounts often become increasingly fantastical the farther one travels from home. So in the description of Sri Lanka from the Book of Marvels, both text and image focus on the region’s massive snails which are said to be so large that locals live inside their shells and hunt them like wild game. Likewise, Arabia is depicted as a region rich in precious gems which are cut from the stomachs of dragons like pearls from oysters.
In Europe these accounts reinforced notions of cultural and religious superiority, often by characterizing other cultures as immoral or uncivilized.
“This exhibition is an opportunity to exhibit and study the Morgan’s copy of the Book of the Marvels of the World, the most complete extant copy, while also examining its perspective on the global medieval world,” said Colin B. Bailey, Katharine J. Rayner Director of the Morgan Library & Museum.”
Other highlights include:
Latest figures from the online resource thebookguide which aims to list all the secondhand bookshops in the UK and the Republic of Ireland suggests secondhand bookselling has witnessed an impressive increase over the last 12 months.
According to its latest figures, at the end of 2024 there were 1,616 secondhand booksellers listed, compared to 1,380 in 2023, and 1,317 in 2022.
“This is a significant increase,” said Jon Morgan who is one of thebookguide’s co-ordinators, “and while it may be argued that some are charity type shops, they still meet the criteria long since laid down by Mike Goodenough who launched the site in 2001 of physical outlets “wholly or mainly” having significant stocks of books. They are all grist to the mill and many of us have found gems in such places.
“The fact that so many shops are unearthed is, once again, down to the reviewers and while some of the additions have yet to be visited and reviewed, their inclusion makes sense precisely so that they can be visited.”
Graveyard figures i.e. those bookshops removed due to closure permanent or otherwise, indicate that 98 were removed last year compared to 42 the year before and 64 in 2022. Many of those removed are historic closures and may have been shut, but not recently visited by one of the volunteer reviewers who report on changes to hours, owners, locations.
Morgan commented that there has also been a continued rise in charity shops, perhaps filling the gap that used to be served by shops that have been priced out by rising overheads.
“We have several volunteers who have been responsible for identifying brand new outlets or shops previously uncovered and one in particular, “Booker T”, who has worked tirelessly to help us towards the goal of listing all the secondhand bookshops wholly or substantially selling second hand books. Through him we’ve discovered more charity and other shops, which gives a slightly false picture for 2024.
“Over the last few years, we have had greater, closer and deeper engagement between the Guide and bookshops themselves. It is clear that they value the Guide as potentially and actually increasing footfall as well as raising profiles.”
More details and analysis of the openings and closures during 2024 is also available at the Wormwoodiana blog by Mark Valentine who suggests that these figures indicate there are now more secondhand bookshops open in the British Isles than during most of the 20th century.
“Frog in Prague”
by
Stephen Dixon
They stand still. “And Kafka?” Howard says.
“Kafka is not buried here.”
“No? Because I thought—what I mean is the lady at my hotel’s tourist information desk—the Intercontinental over there—and also the one who sold me the ticket now, both told me—”
The man’s shaking his head, looks at him straight-faced. It’s up to you, his look says, if you’re going to give me anything for this tour. I won’t ask. I won’t embarrass you if you don’t give me a crown. But I’m not going to stand here all day waiting for it.
“Here, I want to give you something for all this.” He looks in his wallet. Smallest is a fifty note. Even if he got three-to-one on the black market, it’s still too much. He feels the change in his pocket. Only small coins. This guy’s done this routine with plenty of people, that’s for sure, and he’d really like not to give him anything.
“Come, come,” the man said.
“You understand?” Howard said. “For Kafka’s grave. Just as I told the lady at the ticket window, I’m sure the other parts of this ticket for the Old Synagogue and the Jewish Museum are all very interesting—maybe I’ll take advantage of it some other time—but what I really came to see—”
“Yes, come, come. I work here too. I will show you.”
Howard followed him up a stone path past hundreds of gravestones on both sides, sometimes four or five or he didn’t know how many of them pressed up or leaning against one another. The man stopped, Howard did and looked around for Kafka’s grave, though he knew one of these couldn’t be it. “You see,” the man said, “the governor at the time—it was the fourteenth century and by now there were twelve thousand people buried here. He said no when the Jewish elders of Prague asked to expand the cemetery. So what did the Jews do? They built down and up, not outwards, not away. They kept inside the original lines of the cemetery permitted them. Twelve times they built down and up till they had twelve of what do you call them in English, plateaus? Places?” and he moved his hand up in levels.
“Levels?”
“Yes, that would be right. Twelve of them and then the ground stopped and they also couldn’t go any higher up without being the city’s highest cemetery hill, so they couldn’t make any levels anymore.”
“So that accounts for these gravestones being, well, the way they are. All on top of one another, pressed togetherlike. Below ground there’s actually twelve coffins or their equivalents, one on top of—”
“Yes, yes, that’s so.” He walked on about fifty feet, stopped. “Another governor wouldn’t let the Jews in this country take the names of son-of anymore. Son of Isaac, Son of Abraham. They had to take, perhaps out of punishment, but history is not clear on this, the names of animals or things from the earth and so on.” He pointed to the stone relief of a lion at the top of one gravestone. “Lion, you see.” To a bunch of grapes on another stone: “Wine, this one. And others, if we took the time to look, all around, but of that historical era.”
“So that’s why the name Kafka is that of a bird if I’m not mistaken. Jackdaw, I understand it means in Czech. The Kafka family, years back, must have taken it or were given it, right? Which?”
“Yes, Kafka. Kafka.” Howard didn’t think by the man’s expression he understood. “Come, please.” They moved on another hundred feet or so, stopped. “See these two hands on the monument? That is the stone of one who could give blessings—a Cohen. No animal there, but his sign. Next to it,” pointing to another gravestone, “is a jaw.”
“A jaw?” The stone relief of this one was of a pitcher. “Jar, do you mean?”
“Yes. Jaw, jaw. That is a Levi, one who brings the holy water to wash the hands of a Cohen. That they are side by side is only a coincidence. On the next monument you see more berries but of a different kind than wine. Fertility.”
“Does that mean a woman’s buried here? Or maybe a farmer?”
“Yes. Come, come.” They went past many stones and sarcophagi. All of them seemed to be hundreds of years old and were crumbling in places. Most of the names and dates on them couldn’t be read. The newer section of the cemetery, where Kafka had to be buried, had to be in an area one couldn’t see from here. He remembered the photograph of the gravestone of Kafka and his parents. Kafka’s name on top—he was the first to go—his father’s and mother’s below his. It was in a recent biography of him he’d read, or at least read the last half of, not really being interested in the genealogical and formative parts of an artist’s life, before he left for Europe. The stone was upright, though the photo could have been taken many years ago, and close to several upright stones but not touching them. The names and dates on it, and also the lines in Hebrew under Kafka’s name, could be read clearly. It looked no different from any gravestone in an ordinary relatively old crowded Jewish cemetery. The one a couple of miles past the Queens side of the Fifty-ninth Street Bridge where some of his own family were buried.
The man walked, Howard followed him. “Here is the monument of Mordecai Maisel. It is much larger than the others because he was a very rich important man. More money than even the king, he had. The king would borrow from him when he needed it for public matters. Later, after he paid it back, he would say to him ‘Mordecai, what can I give you in return for this great favor?’ Mordecai would always say ‘Give not to me but to my people,’ and that did help to make life better in Prague for the Jews of that time. He was a good wealthy man, Mordecai Maisel. Come, come.”
They stopped at another sarcophagus. Hundreds of little stones had been placed on the ledges and little folded-up pieces of paper pushed into the crevices of it. “Here is Rabbi Low. As you see, people still put notes inside his monument asking for special favors from him.”
“Why, he was a mystic?”
“You don’t know of the famous Rabbi Löw?”
“No. I mean, his name does sound familiar, but I’m afraid my interest is mostly literature. Kafka. I’ve seen several of his residences in this neighborhood. Where he worked for so many years near the railroad station, and also that very little house on Golden Lane, I think it’s translated as, across the river near the castle. A couple of places where Rilke lived too.”
“So, literature, what else am I talking of here? The Golem. A world famous play. Well? Rabbi Low. Of the sixteenth century. He started it. He’s known all over.”
“I’ve certainly heard of the play. It was performed in New York City—in a theater in Central Park—last summer. I didn’t know it was Rabbi Low who started the legend.”
“Yes, he, he. The originator. Others may say other rabbis might have, but it was only Rabbi Low, nobody else. Then he knocked the Golem to pieces when it went crazy on him. Come, come.”
They went on. The man showed him the grave of the only Jewish woman in medieval Prague who had been permitted to marry nobil
ity. “Her husband buried here too?” Howard said. “No, of course not. It was out-of-religion. The permission she got to marry was from our elders. He’s somewhere else.” The stone of one of the mayors of the Jewish ghetto in seventeenth-century Prague. The stone of a well-known iron craftsman whose name the man had to repeat several times before Howard gave up trying to make it out but nodded he had finally understood. Then they came to the entrance again. After the man said Kafka wasn’t buried here and Howard said he wanted to give him something for all this, he finally gives him the fifty note, the man pockets it and Howard asks if he might know where Kafka is buried.
“Oh, in Strašnice cemetery. The Jewish part of it, nothing separate anymore. It isn’t far from here. You take a tube. Fifteen minutes and you are there,” and he skims one hand off the other to show how a train goes straight out to it. “It’s in walking distance from the station. On a nice day unlike today the walk is a simple and pleasant one. And once you have reached it you ask at the gate to see Kafka’s grave and someone there will show you around.”
It’s a bit off topic, but I’ve been increasingly frustrated by the increasing number of paywalled sites that I seem to encounter daily. Obviously for-profit businesses need to raise revue to continue to function, but why tease online information and then extort subscription fees for access. It’s particularly frustration on websites that are already awash in ads.
Is access to information a universal right or a privilege? Depending on your answer to this question, you may have mixed feelings about removing paywalls. I am all for paying for services that I get a lot of value from. I rarely run into a pay-wall in the first place. But when I do run into one, it’s usually because some article from an outlet I don’t frequent caught my interest and is behind a very strict pay-wall. Sorry, but I’m not about to fork over $10+ for a single article I don’t even know the quality of.
Some pay-walls are more technically sophisticated than others, so the things I am about to mention may not even work for you. I think they are worth bookmarking even if not 100% reliable. If you are lucky, the pay-wall is essentially a bit of JavaScript code layered on top of the article, in which case using a service that shows you the page without loading this JavaScript code will do the trick. If you paste the link to your article into 12ft.io, you may be able to read the article without any issues. If your browser has a “reader mode” this may also work. Should this trick not work for you don’t lose hope quite yet.
Some outlets will have impenetrable pay-walls – unless you are a robot, in which case they may grant you a free peek. This is because these outlets want their articles to be indexed by search engines so that they show up when people search for stuff. Search engines basically have bots “crawl” from web-page to web-page to make sense of the pages content and importance. If the article you want to read has been visited by the internet archive’s bot, you have a pretty solid chance of being able to read that article. Simply copy the link to the article and paste it into the search bar on archive.org. If the article is in the archive, you should now be able to see the full thing. If it’s not, you can request it to be archived or just try again later. Of course, very recent articles are unlikely to have been archived already. Sometimes even if the page is archived it will still show the pay wall.
Filmmaker David Lynch sadly passed away last week. I was today years old when I discovered that he had created a newspaper comic strip called ‘The Angriest Dog in the World’.
I have heard from some TBTP followers outside of North America who are baffled by the new status quo in the United States. The video and synopsis below go a long way in explaining the morass that we now find ourselves in over here.
or over two decades, I and a handful of others — Sheldon Wolin, Noam Chomsky, Chalmers Johnson, Barbara Ehrenreich and Ralph Nader — warned that the expanding social inequality and steady erosion of our democratic institutions, including the media, the Congress, organized labor, academia and the courts, would inevitably lead to an authoritarian or Christian fascist state. My books — “American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America” (2007), “Empire of Illusion: The End of Literacy and the Triumph of Spectacle” (2009), “Death of the Liberal Class” (2010), “Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt” (2012), written with Joe Sacco, “Wages of Rebellion” (2015) and “America: The Farewell Tour” (2018) were a succession of impassioned pleas to take the decay seriously. I take no joy in being correct.
“The rage of those abandoned by the economy, the fears and concerns of a beleaguered and insecure middle class, and the numbing isolation that comes with the loss of community, would be the kindling for a dangerous mass movement,” I wrote in “American Fascists” in 2007. “If these dispossessed were not reincorporated into mainstream society, if they eventually lost all hope of finding good, stable jobs and opportunities for themselves and their children — in short, the promise of a brighter future — the specter of American fascism would beset the nation. This despair, this loss of hope, this denial of a future, led the desperate into the arms of those who promised miracles and dreams of apocalyptic glory.”
President-elect Donald Trump does not herald the advent of fascism. He heralds the collapse of the veneer that masked the corruption within the ruling class and their pretense of democracy. He is the symptom, not the disease. The loss of basic democratic norms began long before Trump, which paved the road to an American totalitarianism. Deindustrialization, deregulation, austerity, unchecked predatory corporations, including the health-care industry, wholesale surveillance of every American, social inequality, an electoral system that is plagued by legalized bribery, endless and futile wars, the largest prison population in the world, but most of all feelings of betrayal, stagnation and despair, are a toxic brew that culminate in an inchoate hatred of the ruling class and the institutions they have deformed to exclusively serve the rich and the powerful. The Democrats are as guilty as the Republicans.
“Trump and his coterie of billionaires, generals, half-wits, Christian fascists, criminals, racists, and moral deviants play the role of the Snopes clan in some of William Faulkner’s novels,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.” “The Snopeses filled the power vacuum of the decayed South and ruthlessly seized control from the degenerated, former slaveholding aristocratic elites. Flem Snopes and his extended family — which includes a killer, a pedophile, a bigamist, an arsonist, a mentally disabled man who copulates with a cow, and a relative who sells tickets to witness the bestiality — are fictional representations of the scum now elevated to the highest level of the federal government. They embody the moral rot unleashed by unfettered capitalism.”
“The usual reference to ‘amorality,’ while accurate, is not sufficiently distinctive and by itself does not allow us to place them, as they should be placed, in a historical moment,” the critic Irving Howe wrote of the Snopeses. “Perhaps the most important thing to be said is that they are what comes afterwards: the creatures that emerge from the devastation, with the slime still upon their lips.”
“Let a world collapse, in the South or Russia, and there appear figures of coarse ambition driving their way up from beneath the social bottom, men to whom moral claims are not so much absurd as incomprehensible, sons of bushwhackers or muzhiks drifting in from nowhere and taking over through the sheer outrageousness of their monolithic force,” Howe wrote. “They become presidents of local banks and chairmen of party regional committees, and later, a trifle slicked up, they muscle their way into Congress or the Politburo. Scavengers without inhibition, they need not believe in the crumbling official code of their society; they need only learn to mimic its sounds.”
The political philosopher Sheldon Wolin called our system of governance “inverted totalitarianism,” one that kept the old iconography, symbols and language, but had surrendered power to corporations and oligarchs. Now we will shift to totalitarianism’s more recognizable form, one dominated by a demagogue and an ideology grounded in the demonization of the other, hypermasculinity and magical thinking.
Fascism is always the bastard child of a bankrupt liberalism.
“We live in a two-tiered legal system, one where poor people are harassed, arrested and jailed for absurd infractions, such as selling loose cigarettes — which led to Eric Garner being choked to death by the New York City police in 2014 — while crimes of appalling magnitude by the oligarchs and corporations, from oil spills to bank fraud in the hundreds of billions of dollars, which wiped out 40 percent of the world’s wealth, are dealt with through tepid administrative controls, symbolic fines, and civil enforcement that give these wealthy perpetrators immunity from criminal prosecution,” I wrote in “America: The Farewell Tour.”
The utopian ideology of neoliberalism and global capitalism is a vast con. Global wealth, rather than being spread equitably, as neoliberal proponents promised, was funneled upward into the hands of a rapacious, oligarchic elite, fueling the worst economic inequality since the age of the robber barons. The working poor, whose unions and rights were stripped from them and whose wages have stagnated or declined over the past 40 years, have been thrust into chronic poverty and underemployment. Their lives, as Barbara Ehrenreich chronicled in “Nickel and Dimed,” are one long, stress-ridden emergency. The middle class is evaporating. Cities that once manufactured products and offered factory jobs are boarded-up-wastelands. Prisons are overflowing. Corporations have orchestrated the destruction of trade barriers, allowing them to stash $1.42 trillion in profits in overseas banks to avoid paying taxes.
Neoliberalism, despite its promise to build and spread democracy, swiftly gutted regulations and hollowed out democratic systems to turn them into corporate leviathans. The labels “liberal” and “conservative” are meaningless in the neoliberal order, evidenced by a Democratic presidential candidate who bragged about an endorsement from Dick Cheney, a war criminal who left office with a 13 percent approval rating. The attraction of Trump is that, although vile and buffoonish, he mocks the bankruptcy of the political charade.
The illusions peddled on our screens — including the fictitious persona created for Trump on The Apprentice — have replaced reality. Politics is burlesque as Kamala Harris’ vapid, celebrity-filled campaign illustrated. It is smoke and mirrors created by the army of agents, publicists, marketing departments, promoters, script writers, television and movie producers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards, wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public announcers and television news personalities. We are a culture awash in lies.
It is not going to get better. The tools to shut down dissent have been cemented into place. Our democracy cratered years ago. We are in the grip of what Søren Kierkegaard called “sickness unto death” — the numbing of the soul by despair that leads to moral and physical debasement. All Trump has to do to establish a naked police state is flip a switch. And he will.
“The worse reality becomes, the less a beleaguered population wants to hear about it,” I wrote at the conclusion of “Empire of Illusion,” “and the more it distracts itself with squalid pseudo-events of celebrity breakdowns, gossip and trivia. These are the debauched revels of a dying civilization.”
Travel Between The Pages 